Individual Differences In Coping

individual differences final issue addressed concerns the role played in the coping process .There are two ways to think about how might influence individual differences in coping. The first, there are stable coping "styles" or "dispositions" that students bring with them to the stressful situations that they encounter. According to this view, students do not approach each coping context anew, but rather bring to bear a preferred set of coping method that remains relatively fixed across time. it locks the person into one modality of responding rather than allowing the person the freedom and flexibility to change response with changing fortune, because Such a view suggests that the development of a coping style would at best be counterproductive.

We assume that the strategies under consideration are used to varying degrees from situation to situation, however, it was not our intent that the cope be used only as a measure of coping dispositions. The cope should be applicable to assessment of situational or time-limited coping efforts as well as dispositional coping styles. We conducted a study to investigate the applicability of the cope to situational coping efforts, in which subjects described how they dealt with an actual stressful event in their lives. This study used the procedure for the Ways of Coping scale (Folkman & Lazarus, 1980). They describe the event and complete a series of ratings. For this study we rephrased the items of the cope to indicate an action that took place in the past, rather than indicating a "typical" response tendency. Study 3 had two purposes. The first was to investigate the adequacy of the COPE as a measure of situational coping, as opposed to a measure of dispositional coping style.Second purpose was to examine the relation between subjects' general coping styles and the situation-specific coping responses that they make to a stressful event. was based on the fact that people vary their use of particular coping strategies as a function of the kind of situation in which they find themselves (Folkman & Lazarus, 1980). We expected the association between dispositional tendencies and specific coping be less than perfect. The data from this study should allow us to obtain approximation of the degree of association between the one and the