The Brief RCOPE: Current psychometric status of a short measure of religious coping.

By K. Pargament, Margaret Feuille, Donna C. Burdzy. 2011

978 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Brief RCOPE is a 14-item measure of religious coping with major life stressors. As the most commonly used measure of religious coping in the literature, it has helped contribute to the growth of knowledge about the roles religion serves in the process of dealing with crisis, trauma, and transition. This paper reports on the development of the Brief RCOPE and its psychometric status. The scale developed out of Pargament’s (1997) program of theory and research on religious coping. The items themselves were generated through interviews with people experiencing major life stressors. Two overarching forms of religious coping, positive and negative, were articulated through factor analysis of the full RCOPE. Positive religious coping methods reflect a secure relationship with a transcendent force, a sense of spiritual connectedness with others, and a benevolent world view. Negative religious coping methods reflect underlying spiritual tensions and struggles within oneself, with others, and with the divine. Empirical studies document the internal consistency of the positive and negative subscales of the Brief RCOPE. Moreover, empirical studies provide support for the construct validity, predictive validity, and incremental validity of the subscales. The Negative Religious Coping subscale, in particular, has emerged as a robust predictor of health-related outcomes. Initial evidence suggests that the Brief RCOPE may be useful as an evaluative tool that is sensitive to the effects of psychological interventions. In short, the Brief RCOPE has demonstrated its utility as an instrument for research and practice in the psychology of religion and spirituality.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/79f591bb825d95cff8acac39cee75d8b2f49a42e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. Justin Thomas
2. Mariapaola Barbato

In Health

1. Justin Thomas
2. Mariapaola Barbato

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Justin Thomas
2. Mariapaola Barbato

Citations in the corpus

• Positive Religious Coping and Mental Health among Christians and Muslims in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “These ideas about religious coping find their psychometric expression in the RCOPE and the Brief RCOPE, presently the most frequently used measure of religious coping in the context of major life stressors (Pargament et al. 2011).”