Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

There are few psychometrically sound measures that assess coping in adults. For example, a widely used measure of coping, the COPE, has highly unstable sub-scales and was developed using a homogenous sample (Lyne & Roger, 2000). Because of these limitations, the Adult Coping Inventory (ACI) was developed. The ACI is a 57-item measure that contains five factors including Problem Solving, Mindfulness, Maladaptive Coping, Social Support and Avoidance. Initial reliability and validity analyses demonstrate good construct, concurrent and incremental validity. The current study involved conducting a confirmatory factor analysis to confirm the factor structure of the ACI. The participant sample consisted of 586 adults (51.4% male, 82.3% white) from the United States collected from an online crowdsourcing website. Results of this study indicate that a five-factor model of the Adult Coping Inventory is the best fit. Next, reliability of the ACI factors and the measure overall were moderate to excellent. Convergent and divergent validity showed mixed findings; however, this may be related to the measure utilized for these analyses. Lastly, the ACI maladaptive subscale outperforms the Brief COPE on somatization, depression, anxiety and overall symptomology. Overall, the ACI is a good measure of coping and improves upon coping measures used in the literature.

Date

5-24-2023

Committee Chair

Mary Lou Kelley

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_dissertations.6171

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