Medical treatment can be stressful for patients, thus potentially affecting wound healing and adjustment during recovery. Hence, the assessment of how individuals cope with stressful medical procedures is important. Cooperating with Prof. Andreas Schwerdtfeger, Prof. Michael Hock and Mag. Eva-Maria Rathner we constructed and empirically evaluated a coping inventory focusing on medical settings.
The ABI-MS is based on the model of coping modes and aims to assess vigilant and cognitive avoidant coping in potentially threatening medical scenarios. It is organized as a stimulus-response inventory consisting of 32 items. Psychometric properties were examined and exploratory full-information factor analysis based on the item response theory were calculated. Additionally, a cross-validation confirmed the structure of the inventory. Taken together, the results indicate that the ABI-MS is a reliable and valid instrument to assess vigilant and cognitive avoidant coping in medical settings.
The inventory was presented at the annual meeting of the European Health Psychology Association in August 2016 in Aberdeen, Scottland and at the annual meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society in March 2017, Spain. Publication is in preparation.