Design and Psychometric Evaluation of Coping Scale in Recipients of Kidney Transplant

Background: Although there are different tools in a coping context, lots of them are general and not applicable in every stressful situation such as transplant. Aim: The aim of this study is to develop and psychometrically evaluate a coping tool with kidney transplant in the Iranian context and culture. Method: In this sequential exploratory study, based on theoretical and practical definitions of constructs for the concept of coping, the initial pool was extracted with 93 items. Face and content validity qualitative and quantitative were calculated. In order to assess the construct validity, exploratory factor analysis was applied. Using Cronbach's alpha and retesting, the consistency of the questionnaire was calculated Results: In the quantitative face validity, all the items whose item impact was more than 1.5 were retained. Seven items were merged during the qualitative content validity since they overlapped each other, making the number of items equal to 80 at this stage. The quantitative content validity was determined by calculating the content validity index (CVI) as 0.9 and factor analysis was performed for all the 80 items. The items decreased to 69 using factor analysis and were classified under 5 categories of understanding the necessity of self-care, intelligent acceptance of changes, conscious enduring of problems, understanding supportive encouragements and spiritual enduring. Finally, the reliability of the questionnaire equaled 0.94 using Cronbach alpha. Implications for Practice: This tool, with understanding and careful testing of the coping degree of transplant patients, could help health service providers to present their services and play their preventive, caring and therapeutic roles to patients.