The structure and properties of the Estonian COPE inventory

The COPE (Carver, Scheier & Weintraub, 1989) is a multidimensional coping inventory to assess the different ways people respond to stress. The present article is about the structure and psychometric properties of the Estonian dispositional COPE. Compared to the original scales the internal reliabilities of the adapted scales were entirely satisfactory (i.e. alphas ranged from 0.49 for Restraint Coping to 0.95 for Alcohol/Drug Use). A cluster analysis with 60 items and a second-order factor analysis with 15 primary scales suggested three underlying factors identified as Task, Avoidance, and Social/Emotional. The three secondary COPE scales were almost independent, except the relation between the Task and the Social/Emotional scale (r=0.17, P<0.001). Women averaged strikingly higher on the Social/Emotional scale whereas men scored higher on the Task scale. A small group of participants (N=33) completed the COPE twice (interval=27 months), the test–retest correlations were r=0.33 (n.s.) for the Task, r=0.61 (P<0.001) for the Avoidance, and r=0.62 (P<0.001) for the Social/Emotional scales, respectively. The correlations between the Estonian COPE and the Estonian NEO-PI (Pulver, Allik, Hämäläinen & Pulkkinen, 1995) demonstrated that the Estonian COPE scales can be meaningfully viewed in a larger dispositional context marked by the Big Five personality traits.