Research on Humanities and Social Sciences www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-5766 (Paper) ISSN 2225-0484 (Online) Vol.7, No.18, 2017 1 Coping Strategies of Students in the United Arab Emirates University: A Research Application of the Arabic Version of the CISS Ahmed Al Najjar Abdalla A.R.M. Hamid Abdullah Seif Abdullah Department of Psychology and Counseling United Arab Emirates University P.O. Box 15551-Alain City – Abu-Dhabi – UAE Email: alnajjar@uaeu.ac.ae Abstract This paper investigated the manner by which students of the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) coped with stress and determined the influence of demographic factors on the coping strategies used by students in an academic setting. The sample consisted of 197 undergraduate Emirati students from the university who were differentiated according to sex, age, year level, and marital status. The study used the Arabic version of the CISS that was formulated and validated by Hamid and Musa (2012) which is a semantic and contextualization adaptation of the CISS. Data gathering was done by means of the survey and the collected data was quantitatively analyzed. The results showed that the students depended on a repertoire of coping mechanisms which were either used frequently or sparingly regardless of sex, age, year level, or marital status. The findings depict a culturally endemic outlook of student coping in the context of the universal phenomenon of university education which makes it differ from the picture of coping among students in other cultural circumstances. On the basis of the extent to which coping strategies were used, the students of the UAEU can be better seen as contingent or repertorial copers. Key words: Academic stress, coping, coping strategy, coping styles inventory 1. Introduction Coping with stressful situations has attracted a tremendous interest of many researchers due to its importance in understanding human behavior. The increasing significance of coping comes corollary to the growing worldwide phenomenon of stress which has taken third place in the realm of human problems next to death and taxes (Bernstein et al.,2008). Stress does not spare anyone and among those who universally experience stress early in life are the students. Students experience a different degree of stress compared to their non-student counterparts (Keinan & Pelsberg, 1986) as they are subjected to different kinds of stressors during their educational journey (Bataineh, 2013). The kind of stress that students experience as the result of the effects of various stressors in the school environment has been collectively known as academic stress (Sarita, 2015).