Strategies used by families to cope with chronic mental illnesses: Psychometric properties of the family crisis oriented personal evaluation scale.

Purpose: This study was aimed at investigating the psychometric properties of the Family Crisis Oriented Personal Evaluation Scale (F-COPES) for Turkish society, which assesses the coping skills of caregivers of individuals with chronic mental illnesses.

Design And Methods: The study was conducted with 153 family caregivers of patients with a chronic mental illness admitted to the inpatient and outpatient units of two university hospitals and İzmir Schizophrenia Solidarity Association. For the language validity, the translation-back translation method was performed, for the content validity, expert opinions were obtained, for the construct validity, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was performed. For the reliability analysis, Cronbach α reliability coefficient was calculated and the test-retest reliability analysis was performed.

Findings: The content validity index of the scale was 0.96. The Cronbach's α reliability coefficient for the overall scale was .80. Factor loadings of the subscales ranged between 0.56 and 0.69 for the Acquiring Social Support subscale, between 0.43 and 0.74 for the Reframing subscale, between 0.53 and 0.74 for the Seeking Spiritual Support subscale. The model fit indexes were as follows: χ = 176.369, df = 116, χ /df = 1.52, RMSEA = 0.059, CFI = 0.90, IFI = 0.91, GFI = 0.88.

Practice Implications: The results of the present study show that the levels of psychometric properties of F-COPES in Turkish society are acceptable. It is thought that it would be useful to use the F-COPES in the assessment of coping behaviors of individuals who give care to patients with a chronic mental illness and that it can be used as measurement tool in studies to be conducted with caregivers of patients with a chronic mental illness to assess their coping skills.