Coping with the COVID-19 Crisis Through Faith-Based Strategies: A Multiple-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis in Colombia

This study examines how adults in Colombia employed religious and other psychological coping strategies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a specific focus on the role of faith-based practices in shaping adaptive responses. Drawing on Lazarus and Folkman's transactional model of stress and coping and grounded in the Colombian context where religion holds strong cultural significance, we analyzed data from 5,559 participants using a psychometrically validated coping strategies scale with an approximate response rate around 62.1%. While the validation process ensured the reliability of the instrument, our focus was to explore how coping strategies clustered into distinct psychosocial profiles, how these profiles varied across sociodemographic subgroups, and how religious coping was integrated within each configuration. Cluster analysis identified four coping profiles, two of which featured strong religious engagement. Multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis confirmed measurement invariance across groups, supporting valid comparisons. The findings reveal that religious coping co-occurred to varying degrees with other strategies, such as problem-solving, emotional avoidance, and social or professional support, based on latent inter-factor correlations from an oblique confirmatory factor analysis. These results highlight the culturally embedded nature of faith in collective coping and contribute to the literature on religious resilience during large-scale public health crises.