| Previous researchers have not demonstrated incremental validity of using scales of religious coping over standard measures of coping. Using a sample of bereaved adults, I tested the incremental validity of the RCOPE (Pargament, Koenig, & Perez, 2000) compared to the COPE (Carver, Scheir, & Weintraub, 1989), a coping scale that is not specific to religious coping but does include items about religious coping. Dependent variables were symptoms of major depression as assessed by the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II; Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996), grief-specific distress as measured by the Inventory of Complicated Grief (ICG; Prigerson et al., 1995), and well-being as measured by the Scales of Psychological Well-Being (Ryff, 1989). To test for incremental validity, I controlled for religiousness in regression models then added the COPE followed by the RCOPE. A large degree of collinearity forced me to exclude a small number of COPE subscales and nearly every RCOPE subscale to obtain models that were not explaining all variance in outcome variables (over fitting the data). The models that included RCOPE subscales typically explained relatively little additional variance in the outcomes compared to models with the religiosity and COPE subscales alone. Therefore, the added benefits of the RCOPE do not warrant the burden of administering the full scale and generally contribute little to the understanding of likely outcomes of grief. |
