Assessing the BRIEF spiritual/religious coping scale among older Brazilians

ABSTRACT

Spiritual/religious coping (SRC) is an important behavioral resource that helps people better manage physical and psychosocial challenges. Measuring SRC is particularly important in older age as this time in the life course brings many losses and changes. We assessed the psychometric properties of the 49-item BRIEF-SRC among 403 older Brazilians. Positive and negative SRC dimensions were internally consistent. Strong empirical support was found for the proposed structure of four of seven positive and all four negative sub-dimensions. More work needs to be done to assess and, ideally, further refine the positive sub-dimensions of this Brazilian behavioral scale.

KEYWORDS:

• Brazil
• coping
• nursing home
• older adults
• reliability
• religion
• spirituality
• validity

Conflict of Interest

No conflict of interest has been declared by the author(s).

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP [Grant No: 2013/08212-7], Doctoral Scholarship from the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES (Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education), and Sandwich Doctorate scholarship from the National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development - CNPq., at the Faculty of Nursing-University of Alberta, Canada. Process Number: 209762/2015-2.