Coping with coping assessment: A critical review

The recent literature on self‐report measures of coping reactions and strategies is reviewed and critically evaluated. Most of the coping research has focused on assessing several basic coping behaviours or reactions. These include dimensions such as task‐oriented coping, emotion‐oriented coping, and avoidance‐oriented coping. In general, most of the coping scales that have been developed have a variety of psychometric inadequacies. This state of affairs has created at least two major problems in the coping literature: (1) The proliferation of problematic coping scales, sometimes measuring different constructs, makes it difficult to generalize from one population and/or one health problem to another. (2) Since psychometrically sound instruments are a precondition for studying the relationships among coping, personality, and health, scales with psychometric problems preclude obtaining valid and generalizable information about coping behaviour. Methodological problems in the area have seriously restricted the development of a systematic body of theory and empirical knowledge about coping.