Limitations
Only 100 participants were recruited from one medical centre
in an urban area, using a convenience sampling technique.
Although the findings are important and raise relevant
questions, they thus cannot be generalized across Taiwan or
beyond. Another limitation is that the Cronbach’s alphas of
the emotion-focused coping subscale of the C-RWCC = 0Æ67,
is lower than an acceptable reliability value. Previous
research has found that a greater incidence of co-morbidity
was associated with poorer quality of life among cardiac
patients (Friedman 2003). Patients with a history of more
than one episode of cardiac surgery were not excluded and
this might have affected the results. Therefore, co-morbidities
and number and type of previous cardiac surgery should be
included in the demographic data. Age was not associated
with adaptation outcomes in this study; however, age should