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De La Brief Cope La Traducerea Altui Articol
De La Brief Cope La Traducerea Altui Articol
Dr Ben Buchanan
NovoPsych CEO & Psychologist
June 25, 2021
Hegarty, D., Buchanan, B. ( 2021, June 25). The Value of NovoPsych Data – New Norms
for the Brief-COPE. NovoPsych
As NovoPsych has a lot of clinical data for a wide variety of psychological tests we are
beginning to use this data to develop our own clinical norms. We believe there is added
benefit in using this data for clinical norms as we have large sample sizes that are
generally larger than what the tests were originally normed on. There is also the added
benefit that the norms are then a good reality of what clinicians are seeing in their day-
to-day practice.
In this article we discuss how we created norms for one the assessments in NovoPsych,
the Brief COPE.
To use this valuable real-world data it is important that we engage in thorough “data
tidying” to ensure the picture we are getting isn’t distorted. We’ve developed algorithms
to exclude non-valid data, for example picking up on when a clinician might be testing
out a scale by entering all responses with the minimum values, the maximum values, or
just playing around by entering different values. We can use the time taken to complete
the test where we are assuming that when tests are completed either too quickly or too
slowly (when compared to the norm) they might be ‘practice’ data. Thankfully given our
large dataset we can afford to err on the side of caution and remove lots of potentially
dubious data.
To clean the data we used time taken to complete the assessment and found it was
heavily right-skewed with a lot of participants taking a great length of time to complete
the assessment (up to 21 hours). Data that took significantly longer (> 3 S.D.) than the
mean (342 seconds) to complete were considered outliers and were removed. After data
removal the maximum time for completion was 632 seconds – this seems a reasonable
amount of time to complete the 28 items (at an average of 22.5 seconds per response).
Responses that took 60 seconds or less to complete were also removed as it was
thought that this was too quick for someone to complete the assessment properly.
There was a small number of data entries (n = 47) where there was missing data for the
individual items in the survey, so these items were removed. Data was removed where
the respondent indicated that they were not using any coping strategies at all (i.e. a total
raw score of 28) as it was thought that these were more likely to be ‘dummy’ or practice
responses. We also removed data where the client name was either “dummy client”,
“test”, “patient”, “generic”, as these might be dummy responses. It is recognised that
some of these could be legitimate responses, however it was thought that it was best to
remove all of these to be sure.
As a final step, the raw total score was used to determine other possible outlier
responses by removing data that was +/- 3 S.D.s from the mean.
As a result of this data tidying there were 877 responses removed and the final sample
size for the NovoPsych Brief COPE clinical data was 3635. This final data presented as
an approximate normal distribution for the total scores (see Figure 1), although the time
taken to complete data was still right-skewed (see Figure 2).
Figure 3. Comparison of clinical data to the calculated percentiles when using results
from Poulous et al. (2020) and Dollen et al. (2015). The means and standard deviations
used to calculate the percentiles from the Poulous et al. (2020) and Dollen et al. (2015)
data were M = 1.64, SD = 0.45 and M = 2.02, SD = 0.50, respectively.
When comparing the normative data to the clinical data using frequency histograms for
the coping scales, we found that the Dollen et al. (2015) data presented much like the
NovoPsych clinical data, whereas we found the Poulous et al. (2020) data presented
more like what might be expected of normative data. For example, as seen in Figure 3, if
we used our clinical raw data but calculated percentiles using the mean and standard
deviation of the Poulous et al. (2020) sample for Avoidant Coping, we found that a lot of
our data was left-skewed – as might be expected. Conversely, the Dollen et al. (2015)
data looked similar to the clinical data. Therefore, based upon the results observed in our
frequency histograms, it appeared as if the Poulous et al. (2020) data would be the most
appropriate to use for our normative data.
All this analysis and data is synthesized and presented when a NovoPsych user
administer the Brief COPE to a client.
References:
Carver, C. S. (1997). You want to measure coping but your protocol is too long: Consider
the brief cope. International journal of behavioral medicine, 4(1), 92-100.
Carver, C. S., Scheier, M. F., & Weintraub, J. K. (1989). Assessing coping strategies: a
theoretically based approach. Journal of personality and social psychology, 56(2), 267.
Dias, C., Cruz, J. F., and Fonseca, A. M. (2012). The relationship between
multidimensional competitive anxiety, cognitive threat appraisal, and coping
strategies: A multi-sport study. Int. J. Sport Exerc. Psychol.10, 52–65. doi:
10.1080/1612197X.2012.645131
Eisenberg, S. A., Shen, B. J., Schwarz, E. R., & Mallon, S. (2012). Avoidant coping
moderates the association between anxiety and patient-rated physical functioning in
heart failure patients. Journal of behavioral medicine, 35(3), 253-261.
Poulus, D., Coulter, T. J., Trotter, M. G., & Polman, R. (2020). Stress and Coping in
Esports and the Influence of Mental Toughness. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 628.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00628
Eisenberg, S. A., Shen, B. J., Schwarz, E. R., & Mallon, S. (2012). Avoidant coping
moderates the association between anxiety and patient-rated physical functioning in
heart failure patients. Journal of behavioral medicine, 35(3), 253-261.