Patterns of Coping Among Persons with HIV Infection: Configurations, Correlates, and Change

This study examines coping in response to HIV infection, using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample (n = 2,864) of HIV-infected persons. We investigated configurations of coping responses, the correlates of configuration membership, the stability of coping configurations, and the relationship of coping to emotional well-being. Four coping configurations emerged from cluster analyses: relatively frequent use of blame-withdrawal coping, frequent use of distancing, frequent active-approach coping, and infrequent use of all three coping strategies (passive copers). Passive copers had few symptoms, high levels of physical functioning, and high emotional well-being; blame-withdrawal copers had the opposite pattern. Of those completing a second interview 1 year after baseline, 46% had the same coping configuration. Increases in the number of HIV-related symptoms raised the probability of blame-withdrawal coping at follow-up, whereas decreases raised the probability of passive coping. Infrequent use of coping responses at baseline was related to greater emotional well-being 1 year later. This result, in conjunction with the high levels of emotional well-being in the passive cluster, suggests that high levels of distress can induce blame-withdrawal coping whereas coping efforts are minimal when social support and emotional well-being are high. Results highlight issues in ascertaining the causal direction between coping and psychological outcomes, as well as in specifying the nature of stressful situations with which people are coping.     

Biological background knowledge and learning from a drug and alcohol education program

The authors asked whether having a base of relevant biological knowledge put school children in a better position to understand the effects of alcohol and cocaine and to learn about these effects when exposed to a curriculum presenting a physiological theory of drug action. Participants were 337 ethnically diverse 3rd- through 6th-grade students who were pretested, trained, and posttested. Multiple regression analyses revealed that knowledge of the basic functions of the heart, blood, and brain predicted certain drug-knowledge variables. Students with greater biological background knowledge also learned more from instruction, a finding with implications for enhancing drug and other health education programs.     

A community meeting protocol for assault prevention

Assaultive behavior by patients is a serious problem throughout healthcare facilities. Currently, wide variability exists in the approaches used to deal with assaultive behavior. The immediate objective of this study was to perform a consensus validation of the community meeting as a prevention and intervention measure for assault. The community meeting is a regular meeting of all staff and patients for communication, ward management, or psychiatric treatment. A delphi survey, with three iterations, was used to operationalize the collection of judgments and achieve convergence of opinion from expert respondents. A protocol for a Violence Prevention Community Meeting (VPCM) was established.     

The cross-cultural generalizability of Axis-II constructs: an evaluation of two personality disorder assessment instruments in the People's Republic of China

We examined the reliability, cross-instrument validity, and factor structure of Chinese adaptations of the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire (PDQ-4+; N = 1,926) and Personality Disorders Interview (PDI-IV; N = 525) in psychiatric patients. Comparisons with data from Western countries suggest that the psychometric properties of these two instruments are comparable across cultures. Low to modest agreement between the PDQ-4+ and PDI-IV was observed for both dimensional and categorical personality disorder evaluations. When the PDI-IV was used as the diagnostic standard, the PDQ-4+ showed higher sensitivity than specificity, and higher negative predictive power than positive predictive power. Factor analyses of both instruments replicated the four-factor structure O'Connor and Dyce (1998) found in Western samples. Results suggested that conceptions and measures of DSM-IV personality disorders are cross-culturally generalizable to Chinese psychiatric populations.     

Self-perceptions of stability and change in personality at midlife: the UNC Alumni Heart Study

The finding of personality stability in adulthood may be counterintuitive to people who perceive a great deal of change in their own personality. The purpose of this study is to determine whether self-reported perceived changes in personality are associated with actual changes based on a 6- to 9-year follow-up of 2,242 middle-aged male and female participants of the UNC Alumni Heart Study (UNCAHS). Respondents completed the Revised NEO Personality Inventory on two occasions and were asked to reflect back over a 6-year period and assess changes in their personality. The majority of respondents (n = 1,177; 52.5%) reported they had "stayed the same," while 863 (38.5%) reported they had "changed a little" and 202 (9%) reported they had "changed a good deal." Coefficients of personality profile agreement computed to evaluate global personality change for the three perceived change groups were essentially equivalent. Further, directional analyses of domain-specific changes in personality showed that perceived changes were weak predictors of residual gain scores. In an absolute sense, perceptions of stability or change were discordant in 8 of 15 (53%) comparisons. Self-perceptions of change are not an adequate substitute for objective assessments.     

Personality at midlife: stability, intrinsic maturation, and response to life events

Although developmental theories and popular accounts suggest that midlife is a time of turmoil and change, longitudinal studies of personality traits have generally found stability of rank order and little or no change in mean levels. Using data from 2,274 men and women in their 40s retested after 6 to 9 years, the present study examined two hypotheses: (a) that retest correlations should be no higher than about .60 and (b) that there should be small decreases in Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness, and small increases in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. The study also explored the effects of recalled life events on subsequent personality scores. Results did not support the first hypothesis; uncorrected retest correlations uniformly exceeded .60. This was true for all personality traits, including facets of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness not previously included in longitudinal studies. The hypothesized decreases in Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness were found, but Conscientiousness showed a small decrease instead of the predicted increase. Life events in general showed very little influence on the levels of personality traits, although some effects were seen for changes in job and marital status that warrant further research.     

Instrumental variables in factor analysis

The factor analysis model is rewritten as a system of linear structural relations with errors in variables. The method of instrumental variables is applied to this revised form of the model to obtain estimates of the factor loading matrix. The relation between this method and interbattery analysis, proportional profile analysis, and canonical factor analysis is pointed out. In addition, an estimation procedure based on replicated sampling different from proportional profile analysis is given.     

Thurstonian modeling of ranking data via mean and covariance structure analysis

Although Thurstonian models provide an attractive representation of choice behavior, they have not been extensively used in ranking applications since only recently efficient estimation methods for these models have been developed. These, however, require the use of special-purpose estimation programs, which limits their applicability. Here we introduce a formulation of Thurstonian ranking models that turns an idiosyncratic estimation problem into an estimation problem involving mean and covariance structures with dichotomous indicators. Well-known standard solutions for the latter can be readily applied to this specific problem, and as a result any Thurstonian model for ranking data can be fitted using existing general purpose software for mean and covariance structure analysis. Although the most popular programs for covariance structure analysis (e.g., LISREL and EQS) cannot be presently used to estimate Thurstonian ranking models, other programs such as MECOSA already exist that can be straightforwardly used to estimate these models.This paper is based on the author's doctoral dissertation. Ulf Böckenholt was my advisor. The author is indebted to Ulf Böckenholt for his comments on a previous version of this paper and to Gerhard Arminger for his extensive support on the use of MECOSA. The final stages of this research took place while the author was at the Department of Statistics and Econometrics, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Conversations with my colleague there, Adolfo Hernández, helped to greatly improve this paper.