Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Among Hospital Surgical Physicians Exposed to Victims of Terror

A Systematic Review of Studies Using the Brief COPE: Religious Coping in Factor Analyses

“…PCAs are known to yield unstable factor solutions, especially when used with ordinal-level data [5,11], and conclusions made from such analyses therefore lack validity. While sub-scale-level analyses are more robust, findings were still very variable, with three studies [62][63][64] reporting that turning to religion formed a separate factor and five studies [21,[65][66][67][68] reporting lack of sufficiently high factor loadings for religious coping ( Table 2). The use of general or uni-dimensional religious coping measures to inform about the role of religion in coping with stress has been criticized [17,131], and in the Brief COPE [1], the scope that the religious coping sub-scale can assess is even further limited by the fact it was reduced to two items, compared to the four items in the COPE.…”

“…As with the item-level analyses, the samples were very diverse, and the sample sizes varied from 71 [52] to 1289 [17], with a mean of 288.70. Twelve studies [17,18,[52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61] reported that the turning to religion sub-scale loaded to a factor with at least one other sub-scale, three studies [62][63][64] reported that the turning to religion sub-scale formed its own separate factor, and five studies [21,[65][66][67][68] reported that the religion sub-scale did not have a sufficiently high loading with any other factor. As with the item-level analyses (Table 1), PCA was the most frequently used technique, with 9 of the 20 studies [18,[52][53][54]56,57,62,64,66] explicitly stating this method.…”

Gender differences in response to war stress in hospital personnel: Does profession matter? A preliminary study

“…The main limitation of Luce's et al 3 study is that only half of the participants were exposed to trauma. Weiniger et al 6 found no sex differences among surgical physicians. Their sample though was imbalanced with less than 20 percent of women.…”

“…The main limitations of their study is the neglect of profession groups among hospital personnel, the fact that none of the hospital's personnel were exposed to the sniper shooting, none of the victims of the sniper shooting had family ties with any of the hospital personnel, and none of the victims were admitted to the hospital where the study was conducted. Likewise, previous studies examined exposure to victims of bombings, terror attacks and sniper shootings, which represented only a single trauma, or indirect exposure to multiple traumas 3,4,6,10 but not a prolonged exposure to trauma. There are also number of studies that examined medical crew's (ambulance drivers, first aid teams, medics, paramedics, medical technicians, etc.)…”

“…Only few studies have systematically examined the effect of exposure to extreme stress on men and women hospital personnel [3][4][5][6] . However, these studies presented different results.…”