Studies of coping in applied settings often confront the need to minimize time demands on participants. The problem of participant response burden is exacerbated further by the fact that these studies are typically designed to test multiple hypotheses with the same sample, a strategy that entails the use of many time-consuming measures. Such research would benefit from a brief measure of coping that assesses several responses known to be relevant to effective and ineffective coping. This article presents such a brief form of a previously published measure called the COPE inventory (Carver, Scheier, & Weintraub, 1989), which has proven to be useful in health related research. The Brief COPE omits 2 scales of the full COPE, reduces others to 2 items per scale, and adds one scale. Psychometric properties of the Brief COPE are reported, derived from a sample of adults participating in a study of the process of recovery after Hurricane Andrew.
The Brief COPE is available for your research use, by downloading
the
linked page .
To request a reprint of this article, click
here .
Carver Home