Objective:

Coping is defined as cognitive and behavioral efforts to control, win, tolerate or reduce internal or external demands that exceed person’s resources in relation with stress. This paper proposes COPE Inventory as a reduced version including 18 items.

Method:

A cross-sectional study was conducted; 524 workers from institutions located in Porto Alegre and Metropolitan Region (MR), Brazil, selected by accessibility were sampled. 57.6% of the participants, were women between 16-67 years old (M = 30.7, SD = 10). As instruments, the COPE Inventory and a sociodemographic and labor data questionnaire were used. Content validity was analyzed through the judges method. The construct validity was analyzed by confirmatory factor analysis.

Results:

In terms of content validity, the judges confirmed the theoretical and conceptual scope of the scale, considering the elements appropriate to evaluate coping. The confirmatory factor analysis showed adequate adjustment indices for the three-dimensional model: RMSEA = 0.05 (C. I. = 0.04 - 0.06); CFI = 0.94 and satisfactory alphas to the model composed by 18 items, six that evaluate evitative coping strategies (α = 0.71), six that evaluate emotion focused coping (α = 0.78) and six evaluating problem focused coping (α = 0.81) were identified. These results show that COPE has adequate psychometric properties for coping study in Brazil.

Conclusions:

COPE in a reduced version use may contribute to a more agile and more effective evaluation related to the use of coping strategies in Brazilian reality.

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