Adaptation of the Brief Religious Coping Scale on clinical and population samples in Russia

In recent decades there has been a growing research interest in the influence of culture and social context on the process of experiencing critical situations. Research into religious and spiritual coping with critical situations is one of the most mature areas of this field, which has contributed to both the theory and practice of psychotherapeutic care. There is an acute shortage of reliable tools for assessing this aspect of coping and religiosity in the Russian-speaking space. This study aimed to adapt on the Russian-speaking sample the most commonly used instrument in this area, the Brief Religious Coping Scale (B-RCOPE). The psychometric properties of the B-RCOPE were assessed on a mixed sample. The clinical sample included 63 patients of the Mental Health Research Center aged 18 to 71, Orthodox Christians. The population sample consisted of 615 respondents aged 15 to 76, including representatives of various religious denominations as well as those who do not profess any faith. All study participants completed the B-RCOPE Brief Religious Coping Questionnaire and The Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS). The Russian B-RCOPE version was reduced to 13 items during confirmatory factor analysis. The positive and negative religious coping subscales showed high Cronbach's a-values in the clinical and population samples, indicating the Russian B-RCOPE internal reliability. Furthermore, the convergent validity was confirmed by the association between the negative and positive religious coping subscales and the CRS subscales. Thus, the evaluation of the psychometric properties of the Russian version of the B-RCOPE allows us to recommend this instrument for assessing religious coping in Russian-speaking respondents, including those with mental health disorders.