Psychometric Analysis of the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations-Short Form (CISS-SF) among Students

The Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS) is a globally recognized measure of stress coping methods. However, research into the applicability of the CISS-SF in an Iranian context is still in its infancy. The main purpose of the present study was to investigate psychometric properties of the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations-Short Form (CISS-SF, Endler & Parker, 1994) among Iranian university students. Three-hundred university students (150 male and 150 female) completed the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations-Short Form (CISS-SF), the Self-Esteem Scale (SES, Rosenberg, 1965) and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS, Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988). The confirmatory factor analysis method and internal consistency were used to compute the CISS-SF's factorial validity and reliability, respectively. Also, in order to examine the construct validity of the CISS-SF, we computed correlations between different dimensions of CISS-SF with self-esteem and positive and negative affect. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis, based AMOS software, showed that three-factor structure of the task-oriented coping, emotion-oriented coping and avoidance-oriented coping in the Iranian sample had good fit with data. Correlational analyses between task-oriented coping and emotion-oriented coping as well as avoidance-oriented coping with self-esteem and positive and negative affect provided initial evidence for the ACS convergent validity. Internal consistency coefficients for the task-oriented coping, emotion-oriented coping and avoidance-oriented coping subscales were .78, .79 and .79, respectively. In sum, these findings provide evidence for the validity and reliability of the CISS-SF as an instrument to measure coping styles among Iranian university students.