Brazilian study of adaptation and psychometric properties of the Coping Health Inventory for Parents

Abstract

The Coping Health Inventory for Parents (CHIP) evaluates coping patterns of parents of chronically ill children and assesses different coping strategies using three subscales. This study aimed to translate and transculturally adapt the CHIP for a Brazilian sample and investigate the preliminary psychometrics of the scale. Rating scale Rasch analysis was performed on CHIP responses, and the psychometric performance of each of the three subscales was tested. Two hundred twenty parents of individuals with health problems participated in the study, answering a sociodemographic questionnaire—the Brazilian version of the CHIP—and Folkman and Lazarus’s coping questionnaire. All items exhibited good fit to the measurement model, although response categories were not used as intended and little variability on person parameter estimates was obtained. These preliminary results suggested that each construct being measured by the three subscales should be treated separately, corroborating the theoretical model of the original instrument. Suggestions to address the psychometric limitations of the instrument were made in order to improve measurement precision.