Discourse Coping Research: The Road Ahead

Abstract

Research and theory on the topic of coping are undergoing a period of ferment, revision, and elaboration. A number of trenchant critiques of the coping literature have appeared in the past few years, ranging from papers that document the shortcomings of coping checklists to articles that decry the irrelevance of the largely descriptive work on coping to the design of interventions for specific populations (Coyne, 1997; Coyne & Gottlieb, 1996; Lazarus, 2000; Somerfield & McCrae, 2000; Stone, Greenberg, Kennedy-Moore, & Newman, 1991; Tennen, Affleck, Armeli, & Carney, 2000). Collectively, these critiques not only call attention to the many gaps in our knowledge of the nature and effects of coping, but also communicate the disconcerting news that we may not know nearly as much as we thought we knew because of significant methodological and conceptual weaknesses that beset past research. For example, in a simple but elegant way, Stone et al. (1991) have shown that the "extent of use" response categories which appear on the Revised Ways of Coping Checklist (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) do not make sense for many of the coping items, and that many of the coping items themselves do not make sense when they are applied to a stressor that could not possibly elicit those ways of coping. On the latter score, how could someone endorse the item "Tried to get the person responsible to change his or her mind" when the stressor does not even remotely involve other people? Hence, if there are serious problems with the metric that has been used to quantify people's employment of different ways of coping, and if there are fundamental differences among stressors in the range of applicable coping options, then there is good reason to question the meaning and validity of much of the corpus of our knowledge.