Coping strategies among Iranian children with experience of Sarpol-e-Zahab earthquake: factor structure of children's Coping Strategies Checklist-revision1 (CCSC-R1).

Background: Stress-related situations play a significant role in children's lives and result in different reaction in children. Among various methods of evaluating the stressful environment of children, 54-item Children's Coping Strategies Checklist-Revision1 (CCSC-R1) has been developed as one of the most powerful tools for assessing different aspects of coping in children. The purpose of the present study is to find the psychometric properties of Persian CCSC-R1 and to identify the coping strategies used by Iranian children.

Method: Subjects included 401 female students aged between 9 and 13 who were subjected to the Sarpol-e-Zahab earthquake (in Northeast of Iran). Construct and convergence validities were examined with confirmatory factor analysis and correlated with Children's Coping Behavior Questionnaire (CCBQ). Reliability was obtained by internal consistency. Using repeated analysis of variance, the status of coping strategies in children were achieved.

Results: Confirmatory factor analysis showed a good model fit to the four-factor structure, active coping, distracting action/distraction, avoidance, and support seeking strategies. The results also demonstrated that there was a strong relationship between four-factors of CCSC-R1 including their subscales and CCBQ. Internal consistency (Cronbach's Alpha) for the four dimensions were in the range of 0.76 to 0.88. The findings also showed that Iranian children use active coping, especially optimism, more than other strategies in order to deal with their stressful situations.

Conclusions: It is concluded that CCSC-R1 is a valid and reliable instrument which could be employed for Iranian children. Furthermore, in the face of traumatic events, Iranian children acted same as people in individualistic cultures.