The Coping Strategy Questionnaire

General description: The coping strategy questionnaire (CSQ), (Rosenstiel & Keefe 1983) in its original version consists of 50 items assessing patient self rated use of cognitive and behavioural strategies to cope with pain. It comprises six subscales for cognitive strategies (ignoring pain, reinterpretation of pain, diverting attention, coping self statements, catastrophising, praying/hoping) and two subscales for behavioural strategies (increasing activity levels and increasing pain behaviours). Each coping strategy subscale consists of six items measured with a numerical rating scale ranging from 0 (never do that) to 6 (always do that) indicating how frequently the strategy is used to cope with pain. Each subscale has a maximum score of 36 and a minimum score of 0. An additional two single item questions each with a scoring range of 0–6 are used as effectiveness ratings of control over pain and ability to decrease pain. The CSQ takes approximately 5 minutes to complete. Reliability and validity: In a sample of 61 patients with chronic low back pain (CLBP), Rosenstiel and Keefe (1983) reported the internal consistency for the subscales with Cronbach’s alphas ranging from 0.71 to 0.85, except for the increasing pain behaviour subscale which had an internal consistency of 0.28. However, in a sample of 282 CLBP patients, Jensen and Linton (1993) showed that all 8 subscales of the CSQ Swedish version have an internal consistency ranging from 0.69 to 0.84. Similarly, in patients with lung cancer, the CSQ subscales have shown good internal consistency with Cronbach’s alphas ranging from 0.60 to 0.90 (Wilkie & Keefe 1991). Test-retest reliability for a 1 day interval has been reported to range between 0.68 and 0.91 (Main & Waddell 1991), 0.48–0.71 for a 1 week interval and 0.58–0.84 for a 5 week interval (Jensen & Linton 1993).