Assessment of Coping Strategies and Their Associations With Health Related Quality of Life in Patients With Chronic Heart Failure: the Brief COPE Restructured

摘要

BackgroundIndividuals with chronic heart failure (CHF) need to cope with both the physical limitations and the psychological impacts of the disease. Since some coping strategies are beneficial and others are linked to increased mortality and worse health-related quality of life (HRQoL), it is important to have a reliable and valid instrument to detect different coping styles. Brief COPE, a self-reporting questionnaire, has been previously used in the context of CHF. There is, however, currently a lack of consensus about the theoretical or empirical foundations for grouping the multiple coping strategies assessed by Brief COPE into higher order categories of coping. The main purpose of this study was to examine the structure of Brief COPE, founded on the higher order grouping of its subscales in order to establish an assessment model supported by theoretical considerations. Furthermore, the associations between these higher order categories of coping and HRQoL were examined to establish the predictive validity of the selected model in the context of CHF.