Assessing coping strategies: A theoretically based approach.

TLDR

The study develops a multidimensional coping inventory to assess how people respond to stress. The inventory contains five problem‑focused, five emotional‑focused, and three less useful coping scales, and was evaluated in three studies—item development, validity testing with personality measures, and assessment of undergraduates coping with a specific stressful episode. Study 1 yielded the scale items, Study 2 demonstrated preliminary convergent and discriminant validity through correlations with personality measures, and Study 3 provided initial evidence linking dispositional and situational coping tendencies.

Abstract

We developed a multidimensional coping inventory to assess the different ways in which people respond to stress. Five scales (of four items each) measure conceptually distinct aspects of problem-focused coping (active coping, planning, suppression of competing activities, restraint coping, seeking of instrumental social support); five scales measure aspects of what might be viewed as emotional-focused coping (seeking of emotional social support, positive reinterpretation, acceptance, denial, turning to religion); and three scales measure coping responses that arguably are less useful (focus on and venting of emotions, behavioral disengagement, mental disengagement). Study 1 reports the development of scale items. Study 2 reports correlations between the various coping scales and several theoretically relevant personality measures in an effort to provide preliminary information about the inventory's convergent and discriminant validity. Study 3 uses the inventory to assess coping responses among a group of undergraduates who were attempting to cope with a specific stressful episode. This study also allowed an initial examination of associations between dispositional and situational coping tendencies.