Development and Validation of the Robust - Pandemic Coping Scale (R-PCS)

Development and Validation of the Robust - Pandemic Coping Scale (R-PCS)

Blog Article

The psychological consequences of epidemics/pandemics, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, include an increase in psychopathological symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, and stress, and negative emotions, estes c6-5 engines bulk pack such as fear.However, relatively little attention has been paid to how people cope with the pandemic.Coping is a multi-component process, helping to diminish the traumatic impact of stressful events in a variety of ways.We studied how university students coped with the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, by developing the Robust - Pandemic Coping Scale (R-PCS), a new scale for measuring coping strategies related to epidemics/pandemics.

The scale is based on a classification of coping strategies referred to the needs of competence, relatedness, and autonomy.To create a robust scale, such that the item values would be independent of the sample used for developing it, we employed Rasch modeling.We used a sample of 2,987 Italian university students who participated in an online survey including the R-PCS and the Power to Live with Disasters Questionnaire (PLDQ), during March 2020.First, we applied a dual approach combining exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, which supported the goodness of a 4-factor model (i.

e., Despair, Adjustment, Proactivity, and Aversion) for the R-PCS, invariant across gender and age of respondents (younger or as old as 23 years, older than 23 years).We then transformed the raw scores of the R-PCS into interval logit scale scores applying the Rasch model.Second, our findings supported the discriminant validity and the criterion validity of the R-PCS, examining the correlations with the PLDQ.

They also confirmed its predictive validity: the R-PCS scores were related to 2-month-later syil x7 price enjoyment and anger, indicating that Adjustment and Proactivity were adaptive while Despair and Aversion were maladaptive.Third, our study revealed gender and age differences: the scores were higher for Despair, Adjustment, and Proactivity for females; for Aversion for males; and for Proactivity for students older than 23 years.The study suffers from limitations related to social desirability, gender imbalance, and self-selection effects in the recruitment.