Development and reliability and validity of the College Students' Emotion-based Coping Strategies Questionnaire

Objective:To develop the College Students' Emotion-based Coping Strategies Questionnaire(CSECS) and test its reliability and validity,so as to explore the components construct of the college students' emotion-based coping strategies.Methods:Based on the integration of the emotion-focused coping presented by Folkman and Lazarus and the emotional-approach coping presented by Stanton and colleagues,the concept of the emotion-based coping was put forward.Combining with the literature analysis and the result of the open-ended inventory survey and close-ended inventory survey,the theoretical components construct of the college students' emotion-based coping strategy types was obtained and then the questionnaire of the College Students' Emotion-based Coping Strategies was developed.The full-time students from the colleges or universities in the eastern,central and western regions of China were sampled out as respondents.The formal measurement data of the 3321 valid questionnaires was processed with exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis,and the multitrait-multimethod matrix was used to inspect the convergent validity and the discriminant validity.The Brief COPE Scales(B-COPE),Emotional Approach Coping Scales(EAC),Emotional Expressivity Scale(EES),and Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale-Short Version(MCSD-S) was applied to examine the criterion-related validity,and the reliability of the questionnaire was tested.Results:The first-order exploratory factor analysis extracted 9 factors,and the factor loadings of the items were 0.41~0.80.The second-order exploratory factor analysis extracted 4 factors,and the factor loadings were 0.58~0.85.The fitting indices of confirmatory factor analysis reached the requirements of psychometrics(CMIN/DF5,GFI,AGFI,NFI,TLI,and CFI0.90,RMSEA=0.05,RMR0.08).The factors of questionnaire and the theoretically related dimensions of the B-COPE,EAC,and EES had high positive correlation(r=0.50~0.68,P0.01).The correlation between the distracting attention,accepting facts,identifying emotion actively and self-venting factor of questionnaire and the MCSD-S was not statistically significant(r=0.04~0.07,P0.05),while the scores in other factors of questionnaire had lower correlation with the MCSD-S(r=0.07~0.20,P0.05).The Cronbach' s coefficients of first-order factors were 0.60~0.87,and the test-retest reliabilities were 0.67~0.83.The Cronbach' s coefficients of second-order factors were 0.71~0.84,and the test-retest reliabilities were 0.74~0.82.Conclusion:It suggests that the college students' emotion-based coping strategy may be a multi-dimensional and multi-hierarchical model which has 4 second-order factors and 9 first-order factors.The questionnaire may be suitable for measuring the college students' emotion-based coping strategies in China.