Coping style

Historically, psychologists have been interested in categorizing and measurement of coping styles. Moreover, development of culture-specific measures has been neglected in the coping literature. The present study is intended to develop and validate a parsimonious and broad measure of coping style in Iran. An item pool of 80 items was administered on a random sample of 911 university students in ten groups. A principled components analysis was performed on a subsample and a confirmatory factor analysis was performed on the remaining subsample. Twelve concurrent measures were used to ensure concurrent validity. A principled components analysis suggested a nine-factor solution. A confirmatory factor analysis on a distinct subsample confirmed the nine-factor structure. Subscales were labeled as turning to religion, procrastination, positivity, self-blame, avoidance, seeking social support, problem solving, wishful thinking, and passivity. All subscales were significantly correlated with theoretically related constructs. Alpha coefficients of the subscales ranged from 0.77 (problem solving) to 0.92 (turning to religion). The present study developed and validated the 45-item Iranian Coping Style Scale (ICSS) with nine subscales. Therefore, ICSS may be used as a reliable and valid measure of coping styles in research and clinical settings.