COPING RESPONSES OF CHINESE PARENTS WITH PRESCHOOL MENTALLY HANDICAPPED CHILDREN

The Chinese Coping Scale (CCS) was administered to 381 parents of preschool mentally handicapped children, along with other instruments assessing their stress, mental health, marital satisfaction and care-giving patterns. The CCS was found to be reliable and factor analysis with a two-factor solution showed that two factors were abstracted from the scale, namely, Internal Coping and External Coping. It was found that the factors extracted could reliably be reproduced in two random sub-samples and the present results are highly similar to the previously reported data on the dimensionality of the CCS. An examination of the distribution of responses to the CCS items revealed that a significant proportion of the parents seldom sought help from others when dealing with the stress arising from taking care of their handicapped children.