COPING SKILLS IN SPOUSES OF ALCOHOLICS

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Research on assessment and training of alcohol-related coping skills in spouses of alcoholics has been limited. Those studies which do exist have typically failed to systematically assess coping skills, or evaluate change from pre to posttreatment. Moreover, there has been a tendency to rely on frequency measures of coping behaviors which tend to be highly confounded by the actual drinking status of the mate. The present measurement development project is designed to address methodological limitations in this research and to extend previous work of the Principal Investigator on the Spouse Situation Inventory (SSI), a situationally specific inventory of alcohol-related coping skills. In Phase I of the proposal, the existing four, 12-situation inventories of the SSI will be collapsed into two parallel forms of 24 situations each and a scoring system for the two forms will be developed which incorporates both content and behavioral measures. In Phase II several important psychometric properties of the SSI will be evaluated in a 12-month longitudinal analysis of coping skills in both treatment and nontreatment spouses of male alcoholics. Specifically, these psychometric properties will include: (a) a comparative analysis of the factor structures of SSI forms 1 and 2; (b) a generalizability analysis of the SSI with estimation of variance components for persons, items, forms, and raters; (c) an analysis of both short and long-term test-retest reliability; and (d) an evaluation of the concurrent and predictive validity of the SSI with respect to actual spouse coping skills, spouse functioning, and alcoholic mate functioning over six and twelve month follow-up periods. Moreover, the design allows for empirical analysis of situational specificity and differential effectiveness of spouse coping skills on alcoholic mate by longitudinally tracking problem situations, the corresponding spouse coping behavior in the situations, and the subsequent responses of the alcoholic mate. The results of the above analyses will provide a stronger empirical basis for further SSI development and set the stage for future proposals evaluating spouse skill training interventions. The project also extends the study of spouse coping skills to nontreatment populations.