To Study Personality and Coping Strategies among Epilepsy Patients

The study was aimed to find out correlation and gender differences among epilepsy patients on personality and coping strategies. A purposive sample of total 90 (45 males and 45 females) epilepsy patients from Neurocare (Private Neurological Clinic), Yashwantrao Chavan Memorial Hospital and Pad. Dr. D.Y. Patil Medical College, Pune City with age 25 to 65 years were selected. They responded to 'NEO-FFI' test for Five Factor Inventory by Costa and McCrae (1992) and 'Ways of coping questionnaire' by Lazarus and Folkman (1980). The statistical tool Anova was used to study the gender differences on personality and coping strategies and Pearson's correlation was used to find the correlation between personality factors and coping strategies among epilepsy patients. Results showed that there are no gender differences found on neuroticism (F = 0.51), extraversion (F = 0.04), openness to experience (F = 0.01), agreeableness (F = 2.05) and conscientiousness (F = 0.19), problem focused coping strategy (F = 0.38) and emotion focused coping strategy (F = 0.03) among epilepsy patients. While there is positive relationship found between neuroticism and emotion focused coping (r = 0.384), extraversion and problem focused coping (r = 0.514), conscientiousness and problem focused coping (r = 0.497) on 0.05 level and openness to experience and problem focused coping (r = 0.265) on 0.01 level, while negative relationship is found between agreeableness and emotion focused coping strategy (r = -0.290) on 0.05 level.