Mubashir Gull - Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India.
Akbar Husain - Department of Psychology, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India.

Objectives: Parenting is a difficult task. Factors like social support, sense of coherence, self-esteem, hardiness, optimism, internal locus of control, and religious coping play a vital role in this area. This study aimed to develop a religious coping measure for parents of differently-abled children. It also aimed to explore the factor structure and reliability of a religious coping scale. Methods: Two hundred parents of differently-abled children completed the research measure. The mean age and standard deviation of the parents were ۴۰.۰۴ and ۵.۳۱ years, respectively. Exploratory factor analysis was employed to identify the potential factor structure of the religious coping scale. Results: The findings of this study demonstrated that the religious coping scale had ۵ factors comprising “divinely seeking”, “coping attitude”, “religious faith”, “sense of possibility”, and “spiritual and social support”. Discussion: The study showed that the scale had good internal consistency, factorial, and content validity. Furthermore, a significant positive association was found between the dimensions of the religious coping scale. The results suggest that this scale is a reliable and valid tool for measuring religious coping among parents of differently-abled children.

Religious coping, Parents of differently-abled children, Scale, Reliability, Validity, Content validity, Exploratory factor analysis