Factor Structure of the Spanish Version of the Ways of Coping Questionnaire

Delivery of Culturally Competent Care to Children With Cancer and Their Families—The Latino Experience

This article discusses selected cultural factors such as language and interpretation services, beliefs, health care practices, and communication styles of Latino families that can increase and enhance the ability of nurses to work with a child with cancer and his or her family. Suggestions for research and clinical intervention are presented.

Exploring Factors That Affect Score Reliability and Variability

One instrument cited in the literature as an effective measure of approaches to coping is the Ways of Coping Questionnaire (WAYS; Folkman & Lazarus, 2005 ). This study is a reliability generalization (RG) study of the WAYS that strives to further distill psychometric properties of the scores generated by this measure. Results from this meta-analytic investigation of 130 previously published research studies indicate that the Confrontive Coping and Distancing subscales generate the most variable reliability coefficients across studies. Regression analyses suggest that the variables type of scoring, sample size, population type, sample source, gender homogeneity, and racial homogeneity were most important in determining reliability estimates on the Seeking Social Support, Escape-Avoidance, Planful Problem Solving, and Positive Reappraisal subscales. Implications for the use of the WAYS are offered.

Do self-report instruments allow meaningful comparisons across diverse population groups? Testing measurement invariance using the confirmatory factor analysis framework

Comparative public health research makes wide use of self-report instruments. For example, research identifying and explaining health disparities across demographic strata may seek to understand the health effects of patient attitudes or private behaviors. Such personal attributes are difficult or impossible to observe directly and are often best measured by self-reports. Defensible use of self-reports in quantitative comparative research requires not only that the measured constructs have the same meaning across groups, but also that group comparisons of sample estimates (eg, means and variances) reflect true group differences and are not contaminated by group-specific attributes that are unrelated to the construct of interest. Evidence for these desirable properties of measurement instruments can be established within the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) framework; a nested hierarchy of hypotheses is tested that addresses the cross-group invariance of the instrument's psychometric properties. By name, these hypotheses include configural, metric (or pattern), strong (or scalar), and strict factorial invariance. The CFA model and each of these hypotheses are described in nontechnical language. A worked example and technical appendices are included.