Coping strategy: meaning and application

You change something people do every day and notice that some start planning straight away, while others postpone or withdraw. Those are ways of dealing with a demanding situation, known as coping strategies. You will read where the concept comes from, how researchers classify coping and how to use it carefully in target group and communication research.

A coping strategy is a way in which people try to deal with tension or with demands they experience as taxing: by doing something about the situation, by regulating their feelings about it or by preparing for it.

It comes from the transactional model of stress by Lazarus and Folkman, in which coping is a process that changes per situation, not a fixed trait. For target group research, you describe how groups deal with a demand in a specific context, without diagnosing or labelling individuals.

The current concept of coping largely goes back to Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman. In their book Stress, Appraisal, and Coping (1984) they describe stress as a relationship between person and environment, not as a property of the situation alone (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). This is known as the transactional model of stress.

In that tradition, coping is defined as a person's constantly changing cognitive and behavioural efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the person's resources (Folkman et al., 1986, citing Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Coping therefore refers to the effort itself and depends on how someone appraises the situation.

This evaluation is called cognitive appraisal. In primary appraisal, a person evaluates whether anything is at stake in the situation. In secondary appraisal, a person evaluates what, if anything, can be done to prevent harm or improve the prospects (Folkman et al., 1986). In their study of 85 married couples, interviewed monthly for six months, coping varied with what was at stake and which options people saw.

Problem-focused and emotion-focused

The best-known classification distinguishes two functions of coping: altering the troubled relationship between person and environment (problem-focused coping) and regulating distressing emotions (emotion-focused coping) (Folkman et al., 1986). An employee who adjusts a work schedule copes in a problem-focused way; one who reframes the situation positively or seeks support to let off steam copes in an emotion-focused way.

The COPE and the Brief COPE

Carver, Scheier and Weintraub (1989) elaborated the classification in the COPE, a questionnaire with thirteen scales. Five scales cover problem-focused coping, such as active coping, planning and suppression of competing activities. Five cover emotion-focused coping, such as seeking emotional support, positive reinterpretation and acceptance. Three scales describe responses that, according to the authors, are arguably less useful, including behavioural disengagement (Carver et al., 1989).

Carver (1997) later published the Brief COPE: fourteen scales with two items each. Carver stresses there is no overall score and recommends no particular way of generating a dominant coping style (Carver, 1997; author's notes). The questionnaire can be used situationally, about one specific event.

Criticism of the classifications

Skinner, Edge, Altman and Sherwood (2003) analysed a hundred coping assessments and compiled around four hundred ways of coping. They recommended no longer using the three most common higher-order distinctions (problem- versus emotion-focused, approach versus avoidance, cognitive versus behavioural). Instead, they proposed hierarchical systems of action types and identified thirteen potential core families of coping (Skinner et al., 2003). Folkman and Moskowitz (2004) also named measurement, nomenclature and effectiveness as primary challenges (Folkman & Moskowitz, 2004). A classification helps you organise, but it remains a researcher's choice.

Proactive coping

Aspinwall and Taylor (1997) shifted the focus to the moment before a demand. Proactive coping concerns anticipating or detecting potential stressors and acting in advance to prevent them or mute their impact. Their model has five stages: accumulating resources, recognising stressors, initial appraisal, preliminary coping efforts and using feedback about those efforts (Aspinwall & Taylor, 1997). With announced changes, people thus respond before the change arrives.

Not in itself. In the study by Folkman and colleagues, encounters rated as satisfactory went together with more planful problem-solving and positive reappraisal. The authors noted that their cross-sectional, retrospective design does not allow causal conclusions and that effects may run in the opposite direction (Folkman et al., 1986).

Bonanno and Burton (2013) call the assumption that particular strategies always help or always harm the fallacy of uniform efficacy. They propose regulatory flexibility, with three components: sensitivity to context, a diverse repertoire of strategies and responsiveness to feedback (Bonanno & Burton, 2013). A meta-analysis by Cheng, Lau and Chan (2014) of 329 studies with 58,946 participants found a small to moderate average association between coping flexibility and psychological adjustment (r = .23; 95% confidence interval .19–.28). Its strength differed with how flexibility was defined (Cheng et al., 2014).

Postponing can be avoidance, but also deliberately waiting for a better moment. Withdrawing can be disengagement, but also catching your breath. So assess a strategy in its situation.

In target group descriptions, Neurofactor sometimes uses recognisable behavioural patterns for how a group deals with a demand: overcompensating, prioritising, setting boundaries, postponing, withdrawing or blocking. This is an editorial working classification for organising observations: not a validated typology, not a measurement instrument and not a classification of people. You can place the patterns next to the scientific classification; the links below are an interpretation, not an established equivalence.

Coping is about the response to a demand. You research its cause separately, for example with the approach in How do you investigate the cause of the main pain point?.

1. Name the demanding situation. Describe which demand or change you are researching, for whom and over what period.
2. Research the appraisal. Ask what is at stake for people and which options they see.
3. Choose a suitable measurement approach. Combine open questions with a situational questionnaire where it fits. Use scales separately, without an overall score. Check the measurement properties in your own sample.
4. Describe group patterns, not people. Report which strategies occur in a group and when. Draw no conclusions about individuals.
5. Assess strategies in context. For each pattern, ask what it gives and costs the group, without labelling it adaptive or maladaptive in advance.
6. Translate into testable choices. Formulate which support, planning or message might fit, and test it. Mind privacy: questions about dealing with tension can be sensitive, so work voluntarily, confidentially and at group level.

This example is fictional and intended as an illustration. There are no research results.

Situation. A bank moves customer service employees from telephone to a chat channel. At peak times several conversations run at once and the queue visibly grows.

Choice question. How should the bank organise the transition and internal communication so employees can handle peak pressure?

Available information. Team leaders report that some employees take on extra shifts, others postpone the training and some withdraw from team meetings during peaks.

Suitable approach. The bank first researches the appraisal: what is at stake for employees and which options do they see? Then follow interviews and a situational questionnaire about the past four weeks, with separate scales and reporting per group.

Possible interpretation. Suppose one group prioritises and sets boundaries, while another group postpones because the practice session coincides with busy shifts. Then postponing may be a response to the schedule here rather than unwillingness. That is a hypothesis, not an outcome.

Next step. Test an adjustment, such as a practice session outside peak hours or a cap on simultaneous chats, and measure outcomes defined in advance. Group data are no basis for individual guidance.

• Reading coping as a personality trait. Coping changes with situation and appraisal; a pattern in one context does not automatically predict behaviour in another.
• Labelling strategies good or bad in advance. Research suggests that fit depends on the situation and on flexibility.
• Calculating an overall score or coping style. The author of the Brief COPE advises against it; report scales separately.
• Reading correlation as cause. Much coping research is correlational; an association between strategy and outcome does not prove the strategy causes it.
• Applying group data to individuals. A group pattern is not a diagnosis. Target group research is not a clinical assessment and gives no therapeutic advice.
• Presenting the working classification as a validated model. Patterns such as postponing or blocking are editorial labels; support them with your own data.

The transactional model of stress shows that coping depends on appraisal and changes from situation to situation. Classifications such as problem-focused and emotion-focused coping or the COPE scales help you organise, but they are not undisputed. No strategy is good or bad in itself. Use the concept to describe and test group patterns in a concrete context, not to label people.