Coping Health Inventory for Parents
Construct: Parental coping with a child’s medical condition
Description of Measure:
- Developed in 1983
- 45-item measure of a parent’s response to managing demands when a child has a serious or chronic medical condition. Parents and caregivers complete the measure
- Time frame to complete is 30 minutes
- Purpose: to measure a family’s coping with the serious or chronic illness of a child
- Response format: Likert-type scale (0 = not helpful; 1 = minimally helpful; 2 = moderately helpful; 3 = extremely helpful)
- Item examples:
1. Trying to maintain family stability
2. Talking with the doctor about my concerns about my child with the medical condition - Subscales:
1. Maintaining family integration, cooperation, and an optimistic definition of the situation
2. Maintaining social support, self-esteem, and psychological stability
3. Understanding the medical situation through communication with other parents and consultation with medical staff - Languages: English
- Reliability and validity: Alpha reliabilities for the 3 subscales listed above are .79, .79, and .71 (Patterson, McCubbin and Warwick, 1990). This is a widely used measure in studies of children with chronic illness and disability.
- Important normative samples: 308 parents of chronically ill children.
To obtain the instrument: Dr. Hamilton McCubbin, Dean, School of Family Resources, University of Wisconsin, Madison WI 53706-1575. Publisher: National Council of Family Relations.
Reference
McCubbin, H.I., McCubbin, M.A., Patterson, J.M., Cauble, A.E., Wilson, L.R. & Warwick, W. (1983). CHIP-Coping Health Inventory for Parents: An Assessment of Parental Coping Patterns in the Care of the Chronically Ill Child. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 359-370.
