Confirmatory factor analysis of the Spanish version of the brief-COPE in Argentine elderly people

Abstract

Although the theoretical and methodological models in the study of coping have been updated several times in the last decades, they are mainly focused on the adolescent and young adult population. Thus, the first goal of this study was to investigate the latent structure of the Brief-Cope Inventory and to determine its fit in a sample of 504 Argentinian elderly adults of both genders, ranging in ages from 60 to 92 years old. The second goal was to confirm its three-dimensional structure in the collected data from the same sample. The results show that the two-factor model has the best fit for this sample. Likewise, these data ease our understanding of the factor structure behind the coping construct and highlight the active-cognitive coping profiles in the elderly adult population.