A Jackson State University School of Public Health (Initiative) Jackson Heart Study Senior Research Scientist has developed a method to assess the coping skills of patients battling serious illness, such as cardiovascular disease. The assessment known as the Coping Skills Inventory Short-Form (CSI-SF) has become one of the most widely used measures of coping skills by researchers worldwide.
Pioneered by Dr. Clifton Addison, the CSI-SF determines how people manage stress using a 16-item survey (see below) and four coping strategies each indicating problem- vs. emotion-focused engagement or disengagement.
For example, when faced with an issue, do people do one of the following:
1. Engage and manually resolve the problem
2. Ignore the problem and creating no resolution
3. Emotionally react and internally or manually solve the problem
4. Emotionally react and ignore the problem
The assessment was utilized in a 13-country study to test its reliability for determining the coping skills of hemodialysis patients experiencing kidney failure. CSI-SF was selected and administered to more than 10,000 hemodialysis patients who were participants in Phase 4 of the Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study (DOPPS) from 2009-2011 in Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
“…this coping instrument developed by Addison and his team, recently validated and featured in an international study, shines a spotlight on the important contributions to the world of research by researchers from the JSU School of Public Health (Initiative),” said Dr. Mohammad Shahbazi, interim dean of Public Health.
The DOPPS is significant because it is the first study to analyze the usefulness of CSI-SF with patients other than those with cardiovascular disease and is the first to translate the assessment into different languages to explore its use in a large, diverse international group of hemodialysis patients.
The translation included nine different languages: Mandarin (China), Dutch (Belgium), French (France, Canada, Belgium), German, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, and Spanish. The English version was used in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the U.S.
A review of the coping instrument can be found in the December 2016 Journal of Psychosomatic Research article titled “Reliability and Validity of the Coping Strategy Inventory-short form Applied to Hemodialysis Patients in 13 Countries: Results from the Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study (DOPPS).”
According to Research Gate, to date, the manuscript has been used by approximately 1,000 researchers, and the list is growing. The initial validation of the CSI-SF was published in the December 31, 2007, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
This research holds the distinction of being the first paper to be published using Jackson Heart Study participant data. Addison’s co-authors on this project also included JSU School of Public Health JHS researchers Dr. Brenda W. Campbell Jenkins and Gregory Wilson, Sr.
Addison serves on the staff of the Jackson Heart Study Community Outreach Center and the Graduate Training and Education Center located at Jackson State University School of Public Health (Initiative).
