General and Specific Avoidance

Abstract

Abstract. Research on coping has been hampered by psychometric shortcomings in coping scales, which have typically relied on items based on face-value, extracted too many factors or lacked the evidence for the obtained structure from confirmatory factor analysis. The present paper describes the development and concurrent validation of a new three-factor avoidance coping scale, the General and Specific Avoidance Questionnaire (GSAQ), which comprises General Avoidance, Emotional Avoidance, and Conflict Avoidance. In contrast to earlier scales the items were derived from a scenario technique which elicits items from participants’ experience, and the three-factor structure was endorsed by two confirmatory factor analyses on independent samples and a further exploratory factor analysis based on the total pooled sample of participants from all three analyses. Factor correlations indicate that the scales measure discrete facets of the avoidance coping domain, and while concurrent validation showed that General and Conflict Avoidance were related in predictable ways to criterion measures, the pattern for Emotional Avoidance was unexpected.