Coping theory and research: past, present, and future.

The contrasts between two approaches to coping are focused on, one that emphasizes style—that is, it treats coping as a personality characteristic—and another that emphasizes process, efforts to manage stress that change over time and are shaped by the adaptational context out of which it is generated.

Abstract

In this essay in honor of Donald Oken, I emphasize coping as a key concept for theory and research on adaptation and health. My focus will be the contrasts between two approaches to coping, one that emphasizes style—that is, it treats coping as a personality characteristic—and another that emphasizes process—that is, efforts to manage stress that change over time and are shaped by the adaptational context out of which it is generated. I begin with an account of the style and process approaches, discuss their history briefly, set forth the principles of a process approach, describe my own efforts at measurement, and define coping and its functions from a process standpoint. This is followed by a digest of major generalizations that resulted from coping process research. The essay concludes with a discussion of special issues of coping measurement, in particular, the limitations of both coping style and process approaches and how these limitations might be dealt with. There has been a prodigious volume of coping research in the last decade or two, which I can only touch on very selectively. In this essay, I also ignore a host of important developmental issues that have to do with the emergence of coping and its cognitive and motivational bases in infants, as well as a growing literature on whether, how, and why the coping process changes with aging.