Behavioral Psychology / Psicología Conductua (BP) is published by IMR Press from Volume 33 Issue 1 (2025). Previous articles were published by another publisher under the hybrid model (CC-BY-NC license or on a subscription basis), and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement.
1 Universidad de Valencia, España
*Correspondencia: José Manuel Tomás, Dpto. de Metodología de las Ciencias del Comportamiento, Universidad de Valencia, Av. Blasco Ibáñez, 21, 46010 Valencia (España).
E-mail: tomasjm@uv.es
Abstract
Lazarus and Folkman (1984) defined coping as a cognitive and behavioural effort to deal with internal and/or external demands that exceed individual’s resources. These authors also defined two types of coping: problem-focused, which is directed at taking steps to remove or to evade the stressor, and emotion-focused, which is aimed at minimizing distress triggered by stressors (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Aldwin & Revenson, 1987). These dimensions, in turn, may be divided into several coping strategies, which finally define the items in the coping scales. The current study validates the Coping with Stress Questionnaire (Cuestionario de afrontamiento del estrés, CAE; Sandín & Chorot, 2003). An overall result of the research is that this scale has good psychometric properties to be used in the elderly Spanish population. The homogeneity of items and reliability of dimensions were adequate. The confirmatory factor analysis on the items revealed a good model fit, while the dimensions related to criteria as expected. Therefore, it can be concluded that CAE is a reliable and valid questionnaire to measure coping strategies in the elderly.
Keywords
- measurement of coping
- CAE questionnaire
- confirmatory factor analysis
