2 Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Current Coping Assessments Arthur A. Stone, Eileen Kennedy-Moore, Michelle G. Newman, Melanie Greenberg, and John M. Neale The concept of coping has been in the literature for decades. In recent years it has become a research focus of many seeking to understand the role of stress in illness. Early attempts to examine the stress-illness relationship focused on uni- variate models and examined the association between life event checklists and illness measures. However, these studies met with limited success, with corre- lations rarely exceeding .30 (Rabkin & Struening, 1976). In an attempt to improve the prediction of illness, multivariate models were proposed and coping was introduced into the stress-illness equation as a moderator of the effects of stress. Early models of coping were based on psychoanalytic ego psychology. Men- ninger (1963), Haan (1969, 1977), and Vaillant (1977) each developed hierar- chical systems of coping styles to describe the conscious and unconscious processes people use in dealing with their environment. All of these models specified a priori that some processes were more adaptive or functional than others and classified individuals according to their pervasive use of particular coping processes (Lazarus, 1984). Determination of coping style was, however, based mainly on clinical interview assessments which often had a complex intrapsychic theoretical basis. This limited the work of these researchers to studies with small samples, and it limited the acceptance of their work to those scientists subscribing to psycho-dynamic theory. Drawing upon these ego psychology models of coping styles, other researchers developed trait measures of coping. Coping traits were regarded as dispositional characteristics which predispose people to react in certain ways in certain situ- ations (Lazarus, 1984). Unlike the earlier models, coping traits were usually assessed with questionnaires rather than interviews; thus, they were considerably easier to assess. Yet these measures assessed coping along a single dimension, such as repression-sensitization (e.g., Shipley et aI., 1978, 1979) or coping- Stone, A.A., Kennedy-Moore, E., Newman, M.G., Greenberg, M.A., & Neale, J.M. (1992). Conceptual and methodological issues in current coping assessments. In Carpenter, B.N. (Ed.), Personal Coping: Theory, Research and Application (pp. 15-29). Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.