Assessing the BRIEF spiritual/religious coping scale among older Brazilians

Spiritual/religious coping (SRC) is an important behavioral resource that helps people better manage physical and psychosocial challenges. Measuring SRC is particularly important in older age as this time in the life course brings many losses and changes. We assessed the psychometric properties of the 49-item BRIEF-SRC among 403 older Brazilians. Positive and negative SRC dimensions were internally consistent. Strong empirical support was found for the proposed structure of four of seven positive and all four negative sub-dimensions. More work needs to be done to assess and, ideally, further refine the positive sub-dimensions of this Brazilian behavioral scale.