Objectives: To evaluate the effectiveness of a coping training program for the Chinese Special-Service Military Personnel (SSMP) as civil emergency responders.
Methods: A parallel control trial was carried out in four special-service units (camps) stationed in Chongqing, China from Feb. 14th to May 30th, 2009. A total of 396 subjects were recruited and were randomly divided into an intervention group (n=201) and a control group (n=195) by clustering. Over the trial, participants in the intervention group received an additional coping-training program with 14 weekly two-hour sessions while the control group continued their normal work.
Results: Of all 396 participants, 343 attended all the sessions and completed the given measures. In comparison to their own scores in coping strategies at pre-intervention, significant and positive changes were observed in the intervention group (n=176) at post-intervention. Except for the strategy of self-blaming, the coping strategies including problem-solving, help-seeking, avoidance, fantasy and rationalization were improved. The descending order of the absolute change values over the trial in 5 coping strategies was fantasy, help-seeking, avoidance, problem-solving and rationalization. In addition, most subscales of social support and self-consistency, as powerful predictors of coping strategies, changed significantly over the intervention, while these changes were not observed in the control group (n=167).
Conclusions: With the combined use of modular contents and procedural methods, our intervention not only led to fewer choices of immature coping strategies like fantasy, escape and rationalization, but also raised the use of mature coping strategies such as problem-solving and help-seeking. Accordingly, the intervention will be very helpful for regular coping training of Special-Service Units, something which can be verified and generalized for the whole SSMP in a future study.