Coping strategies and their predictive capacity in resilience levels in a sample of women with breast cáncer

Resilience is of great importance in the prevention of psychological or emotional difficulty in adverse situations. In order for people to develop the ability to resist and emerge strengthened after suffering traumatic situations, existence of these adverse events is necessary. Authors are agree on the relationship between resilience and psychological well-being. Thus, we need to know which psychosocial variables can predict high levels of resilience. Specifically, we focus on coping strategies in stressful situations, as predictors of high levels of resilience. To suffer Breast Cancer is a situation that generates high levels of stress, assuming in most cases a traumatic event. Our objective is to analyze the predictive capacity of coping strategies in levels of resilience in a sample of women with breast cancer. The sample consists of a total of 30 women with breast cancer in the treatment phase. They were administered a questionnaire for the collection of sociodemographic data, the COPE Questionnaire (Carver, Scheier, Weintraub, 1989) to evaluate coping strategies and the Resilience Scale of Wagnild and Young (1993). The results show that the strategies of coping, Personal Growth, Distractive Activities of the situation, to use of Humor and Acceptance had a predictive capacity on the dimensions of resilience, Equanimiadad, Feeling good alone, Self-confidence and Perseverance, and the Resilience variable globally considered in women with breast cancer. Therefore, results are obtained that can be very importante to expand futures research studies that provide information on the development of intervention programs with women with breast cancer in the prevention of psychopathological states