The IBD-Cope: A New Instrument for Measuring Coping in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Patients

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has a major impact on psychological well-being. How an individual copes with IBD determines quality of life. We aimed to develop a brief, IBD-specific questionnaire to assess coping strategies (IBD-Cope) and to determine its test-retest reliability and validity.

Twenty IBD coping strategies were initially deemed to have face validity. Participants were recruited from an existing study, specialist outpatient clinics and via email. Distribution analyses were performed before test-retest reliability was determined. Exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) were then performed before cross-sectional validity was tested.

The majority of participants in the study samples were female and most had Crohn's disease. All participants were aged between 18 and 65 years. EFA on the initial validation sample produced two components explaining 42% of the variance, and broadly reflected 'good' and 'bad' coping. EFA on the repeat validation sample showed three questions consistently clustering into either good or bad coping strategies. Good and bad coping strategies defined using the IBD-Cope were positively associated with adaptive (r = 0.57, p < 0.01) and maladaptive (r = 0.55, p < 0.01) coping on the Brief Coping Operations Preference Enquiry (Brief COPE), respectively.

The IBD-Cope is a concise IBD-specific coping strategy questionnaire with demonstrated reliability and validity. The IBD-Cope subscales are moderately correlated with adaptive and maladaptive subscales of the Brief COPE. Prospective studies are required to determine whether the 6 questions represented in the IBD-Cope accurately identify IBD patients who may benefit from interventions to improve coping strategies.