Coping Styles

Introduction

The term coping is generally used in association with the concepts of adaptation and stress, but it bears links to many other concepts as well. Adaptation is a very broad concept which covers many aspects of human behaviour, and coping, in turn, refers to a person's means to achieve or maintain adaptation. Situations which call for readaptation are usually stressful, and coping refers generally to managing stress, or emotional states connected to stress, but also to managing the stressful situations. Coping is the way to avoid the harmful effects of stress. The best known, and in psychological literature the most often quoted, definition of coping comes from Lazarus and Folkman (1984: 141), who define coping as ‘constantly changing cognitive and [Page 264]behavioural efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person’.

There are many other concepts closely related, or sometimes even comparable, to coping. This group consists of concepts such as sense of coherence, hardiness, self-efficacy, locus of control, perceived control, and many others which refer to persons' goals, perceptions or possibilities to control their own life and environment or, at least, to manage them. Also defences may be mentioned here, although many writers and researchers want to separate defences from coping, specifically because defences are considered less conscious than coping. Haan (1977), for example, has made a clear distinction between coping and defences, whereas Kahana et al. (1982) have used the concepts of coping, defence and even adaptation interchangeably.

The above mentioned concepts close to coping refer to dispositional attitudes and behaviours and are thus quite similar to the concept of coping styles. That, in turn, is associated with personality traits, which may be seen quite stable and changing, perhaps, only with life-time individual development. In other words, coping styles refer to rather stable, personality traits like dispositions to handle problematic situations and stress by various ways or strategies. Traditionally, this perspective was predominant in coping research, and it still has its proponents. In recent literature, however, the concept of coping styles has often been used quite loosely, referring also to any broader coping dimensions or even to specific strategies or ways of coping irrespective of whether they are situation specific or dispositional.

Contrary to the style or trait model, the process model emphasizes situation specific ways and strategies of coping. The process model also regards coping as highly conscious behaviour, whereas the trait model includes an idea of coping as a less conscious phenomenon, specifically when defences are accepted as ways of coping. At present, the process model seems to be more generally appreciated than the trait model. In this development the writings of Lazarus and his colleagues have played a major role (e.g. Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). This perspective depicts coping behaviour as very contextual. The process-oriented approach to coping concentrates on the actual thoughts and actions of people in specific events or situations as well as on changes in these thoughts and actions. It differs from the trait or disposition approaches, because it is not trying to identify what a person usually does. Coping is not static, unchanged from a situation or moment to another, but characterized by flexibility: specific ways to handle stress and stressful situations change according to the demands of the situations.

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