Arabic brief COPE scale

The Brief COPE scale assesses an individual’s coping choices using 28 Likert-scale items assessing 14 coping strategies [43]. We used the Arabic Brief Cope scale [44] to assess participants’ coping strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Response choices range from 1 (“I haven’t been doing this at all”) to 4 (“I’ve been doing this a lot”). We analyzed the scores of the 14 coping strategies in our sample using the FACTOR standalone program to test for dimensionality and the number of extractable factors using the Parallel Analysis (PA) method. The correlation matrix between these 14 coping strategies had adequate parameters and sample adequacy indexes (determinant of matrix = 0.014, Bartlett’s statistic = 13,010.5, df = 78, p < 0.001, and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin index of sampling adequacy KMO = 0.86). The principal components analysis suggested the presence of two factors which could be extracted from these 14 coping strategies, after excluding the “substance use” coping strategy due to a high standard error. The resulting two factors were labeled “problem-based” (comprised of: acceptance, planning, active coping, positive reframing, religion, and self-distraction) and “emotion-based” (comprised of: denial, self-blame, venting, use of instrumental support, use of emotional support, behavioral disengagement, and humor). We computed composite scores for both problem-based and emotion-based coping factors by adding the mean scores for each strategy (2 items for each of the 13 strategies), and those composite scores were used for further analysis.