Coping Health Inventory for Parents (CHIP)

Abstract

The Coping Health Inventory for Parents (CHIP; McCubbin, et al., 1983) was further advanced in development as a measure of parental coping patterns. In a 1983 study, McCubbin et al. sought to identify coping patterns parents find helpful in the management of family life and the medical care of child with cystic fibrosis (CF) in the home; establish the reliability of these parental coping patterns; and establish the validity of parental coping patterns in relationship to independent measures of the family environment and changes in the child's health. The CHIP was originally conceptualized (McCubbin, McCubbin, and Cauble, 1979; McCubbin and Patterson, 1981) as an 80-item checklist providing self-report information about how parents perceived their overall response to the management of family life with a CF child. The CF sample of 185 individual parents (95 mothers and 90 fathers) rated 30 of the 80 items as "not applicable." Using the criterion of minimal or negligible variance, the investigators eliminated five additional items. The resulting 45 items were analyzed using the SPSS principal factoring with iterations method. The scree test was applied to the resulting eigenvalues to determine the final three factors which were rotated to a final solution using the varimax criterion: (a) maintaining family integration, cooperation, and an optimistic definition of the situation; (b) maintaining social support, self-esteem, and psychological stability; and (c) understanding the medical situation through communication with other parents and consultation with the medical staff. These patterns were validated against criterion measures of improvements in the child's health and adaptive family-life dimensions of cohesiveness, expressiveness, conflict reduction, organization, and control. Cronbach's alphas, computed for the items on each coping pattern, indicate respectable reliabilities of .79, .79, and .71 for the respective coping patterns. (PsycTESTS Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)