A total of 268 medically ill, elderly, hospitalized patients responded to measures of religious coping and spiritual, psychological and physical functioning at baseline and follow-up two years later. After controlling for relevant variables, religious coping was significantly predictive of spiritual outcome, and changes in mental and physical health. Generally, positive methods of religious coping (e.g. seeking spiritual support, benevolent religious reappraisals) were associated with improvements in health. Negative methods of religious coping (e.g. punishing God reappraisal, interpersonal religious discontent) were predictive of declines in health. Patients who continue to struggle with religious issues over time may be particularly at risk for health-related problems.

Background: Although church attendance has been associated with a reduced risk of mortality, no study has examined the impact of religious struggle with an illness on mortality.

The present study investigated the relationships between positive religious coping (e.g., seeking spiritual support) and spiritual struggle (e.g., anger at God) versus viral load, CD4 count, quality of life, HIV symptoms, depression, self-esteem, social support, and spiritual well-being in 429 patients with HIV/AIDS. Data were collected through patient interview and chart review at baseline and 12-18 months later from four clinical sites. At baseline, positive religious coping was associated with positive outcomes while spiritual struggle was associated with negative outcomes. In addition, high levels of positive religious coping and low levels of spiritual struggle were associated with small but significant improvements over time. These results have implications for assessing religious coping and designing interventions targeting spiritual struggle in patients with HIV/AIDS.

Assessment center ratings of eight abilities from each of five situational exercises were examined for their cross-situational consistency and discriminant validity. A series of confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the ratings were largely (if not totally) situation specific, and that assessors failed to distinguish among the eight target abilities. These results combined with previous research suggest that the assessment center method measures mainly situation-specific performance, not cross-situational managerial abilities. We suggest that the intended constructs might be better measured if more ability-related behaviors were elicited within each exercise and if the cognitive demands placed on assessors were reduced.Most well-known applications of the assessment center method were designed in part to measure constructs assumed to represent conceptually distinct job-related abilities. For example, IBM's centers required assessors to use constructs such as oral communications, decision making, and administrative ability (Hinrichs, 1978). Typically, the task of the assessors has been to integrate observations of assessee behavior from a series of situational exercises, such as the in-basket and group discussion. These observations have then been used as a basis for ratings supposed to reflect the constructs of interest (Sackett & Dreher, 1982.Noting that many centers were designed to measure complex abilities, several investigators (see, e.g., Sackett & Dreher, 1982;Turnage & Muchinsky, 1982) used the multitrait-multimethod matrix approach (cf. Campbell & Fiske, 1959) to evaluate the construct validity of assessment center ratings. This involved intercorrelating the ratings across exercises and examining the correlations to determine (a) the extent to which ratings of the same ability were similar across measurement methods (convergent validity) and (b) the extent to which ratings of different abilities were uncorrelated (discriminant validity). Convergent and discriminant validity help justify inferences regarding construct validity (Campbell & Fiske, 1959).So far, the multitrait-multimethod matrix findings pertaining to assessment centers have not been positive. In centers studied by Sweeney (1976) and by Sackett and Dreher (1982), ratings of the same abilities were virtually uncorrelated across ex-We gratefully acknowledge both John Arnold, who originally suggested using confirmatory factor analysis, and the very helpful comments of two anonymous reviews.

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