Informational coping styles: a validity study

Informational coping style may be an important determinant of coping with threatening situations that has important implications in terms of matching nursing interventions to patients. Two studies were conducted to examine aspects of the construct validity of a pen-and-paper instrument designed to measure informational coping style, the Miller Behavioral Style Scale (MBSS). In Study I, the MBSS was administered to 271 university students to examine item response frequencies, item correlations and internal consistency of the subscales. In Study II the coping responses to a series of different hypothetically threatening situations were examined in a sample of 60 students drawn from the sample used in Study I. The results of Study I indicate a need for revision of the items in the MBSS. The results of Study II provide modest evidence of construct validity and underrepresentation of the MBSS in terms of coping strategies. Furthermore, there was evidence to suggest that the structural approach used in the MBSS fails to capture the precise context in which a coping strategy would be applied and the extent to which a strategy would be used.