Objectives : Although coping skills, the ability to cope adequately, are important for stress management, most existent coping scales are aimed at measuring the individual's coping strategies, and do not regard the individual's coping skill per se. In the present study the author drew up Stress Coping Skill Scales (SCSS) which are aimed at measuring individual's basic skills for coping adequately with stress, and examined their reliability and validity. Method : Self-reports comprising 64 basic coping skills were distributed to 644 participants (247 males, 397 females) with an average age of 35.28 years. The results were treated by factor analysis using Promax Rotation. Reliability of the test was examined using the Cronbach's α coefficient. The author used four analyses to check validity : a) correlation analysis between the SCSS scores and the UPI scores ; b) discriminant analysis of the UPI scores (>35, <34) using the SCSS scores ; c) comparison between the two YG type groups (stable : C, D ; unstable : B, E) ; d) discriminant analysis of the two YG type groups using the SCSS scores. Results : Fourteen factors were elicited by factor analysis, but three were eliminated because they had only two items with a loading of over 0.35. Eleven factors are emotional stress tolerance (10 items), positive coping (7 items), aggression self-control (4 items), availability of social support (3 items), prompt acclimation to a new environment (3 items), self-assertion (3 items), utilization of social support (3 items), positive thinking (4 items), effectiveness in interpersonal relations (4 items), timeliness (3 items), and grasp of, and discernment in problematic situation (3 items). Ten scales of SCSS had an adequately high reliability (0.58-0.84), and Cronbach's α was 0.49 for timeliness, so that it could be treated as a quasi-scale. The UPI score, which expresses the level of mental health, and the SCSS's seven scales were significantly correlated. Also, t-tests indicated that the C-and D-type participants in YG had significantly higher scores in SCSS's eight scales than the B and E types. Discriminant analyses suggested that SCSS can discriminate the mentally unhealthy participants according to UPI from the healthy, and tell the unstable participants (B and E types in YG) from the stable (C and D types). Conclusion : The results of this study suggest that SCSS is a useful scale with high reliability and validity, though there was one quasi-scale of 0.49 in the reliability coefficient.

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The Functional Independence Measure (FIM) which measures independence in activities of daily living (ADL) features in assessing the degree of burden associated with caregiving. In this study, among patients with cerebrovascular disorders, we examined whether the degree of nurse's psychological burden was reflected in the degree of caring burden focusing on the social cognition of FIM. The results revealed a correlation between FIM social cognition items and the degree of nurse's psychological burden which showed that the nurse's psychological burden was reflected in the degree of caring burden. However, in further studying the characteristics of patients whose scores showed different traits in the relationship between the nurse's psychological burden and total FIM social points, some of those patients with cerebrovascular disorders were found to manifest higher brain dysfunction such as attention disorder, executive disorder and social behavioral disorder. Although the percentage of such patients remained low, we found that in some cases the difficulty in coping with such patients experienced by nurses, was not reflected in the degree of caring burden.

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