Brief-COPE questionnaire (Brief-COPE)

Abstract

The Brief-COPE questionnaire is a 28-item self-report questionnaire designed to measure effective and ineffective ways individuals cope with a stressful life event. It is a condensed version of the original 60-item COPE scale developed by Carver, Scheier, and Weintraub (1989). The instrument operationalizes coping broadly as any effort used to minimize distress associated with negative life experiences, providing detailed insight into an individual’s behavioral and cognitive responses to stressors. The scale yields scores on three primary coping styles: Problem-Focused, Emotion-Focused, and Avoidant Coping.

Keywords

Coping strategies, Stress, Psychological assessment, Problem-Focused Coping, Emotion-Focused Coping, Avoidant Coping, Behavioral medicine, Self-report.

Authors

Charles S. Carver, Michael F. Scheier, Jagdish K. Weintraub.

[quads id=5]

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Brief-COPE is to quantify the specific behavioral and cognitive strategies individuals use when faced with a significant hardship or stressful life event. It allows clinicians and researchers to distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive coping responses, thereby providing a comprehensive assessment of an individual’s resilience profile.

The scale is widely utilized in clinical and health-care settings to ascertain how patients are emotionally responding to serious circumstances, such as a cancer diagnosis, heart failure, injuries, or mental illness. In counseling and psychological intervention contexts, the Brief-COPE is highly useful for clinical formulation, helping to identify and address unhelpful response patterns to stressors.

Construct

The Brief-COPE measures the psychological construct of coping, which is theoretically defined as the dynamic effort to minimize or manage distress resulting from negative life experiences. The 28-item scale is structured around three overarching coping styles that capture the breadth of behavioral responses:

• Problem-Focused Coping: Strategies aimed at actively changing or modifying the stressful situation itself. High scores are associated with psychological strength and positive outcomes.
• Emotion-Focused Coping: Strategies aimed at regulating the emotional distress associated with the situation.
• Avoidant Coping: Efforts, either physical or cognitive, to disengage from or ignore the stressor.

In addition to these three main styles, the Brief-COPE reports on 14 specific facets of coping, including Self-Distraction, Denial, Substance Use, Planning, Positive Reframing, and Humour, allowing for a highly granular analysis of the respondent’s coping profile.

Validity

The Brief-COPE was developed as a short form of the original 60-item COPE scale, which was theoretically derived based on established models of coping, ensuring strong initial conceptual validity. The brief version was initially validated by Carver (1997) on a community sample of 168 participants who had been impacted by a hurricane.

Subsequent studies have confirmed the scale’s utility across diverse populations. For instance, research involving heart failure patients demonstrated that avoidant coping significantly moderated the association between anxiety and physical functioning (Eisenberg et al., 2012). This evidence supports the scale’s construct validity in chronic illness settings and confirms its ability to measure both adaptive and maladaptive responses to adversity.

Reliability

The reliability of the Brief-COPE is supported by its consistent factor structure across varied populations and its use in establishing robust normative data. Studies, such as that by Poulus et al. (2020) involving 316 esports athletes, provided specific means and standard deviations for the subscales, indicating consistent measurement properties:

• Problem focused – 2.47 (0.63)
• Emotional focused – 2.23 (0.49)
• Avoidant coping – 1.64 (0.45)

Furthermore, clinical reliability is supported by the compilation of extensive normative data from a large sample (n = 3635) of patients receiving psychological intervention in outpatient settings (Hegarty & Buchanan, 2021). This data is essential for computing clinical percentiles, allowing for reliable comparisons against a relevant clinical benchmark.

Factor Analysis

The underlying factor analysis of the Brief-COPE has been examined in various studies, resulting in different proposed models. Eisenberg et al. (2012), analyzing heart failure patients, suggested a two-factor structure comprising (1) Avoidant Coping and (2) Approach Coping.

However, the most commonly accepted and utilized structure, particularly for scoring purposes in clinical practice, is the three-factor model supported by analyses such as Dias et al. (2012). This model divides the scale into the three overarching styles: Problem-focused coping, Emotion-focused coping, and Avoidant coping. This structure provides a balanced view of strategies aimed at action, emotion regulation, and disengagement.

Instrument

Test Type: Self-report questionnaire; Psychological Inventory

Format: 28 items scored on a 4-point Likert scale (1 = I haven’t been doing this at all; 4 = I’ve been doing this a lot)

Language Available: English (Original)

Population Group: General and Clinical populations experiencing significant stressors

Age Group: Adults

Population Details: The scale has been validated across diverse groups, including community samples affected by natural disasters, patients with chronic conditions, and specialized groups like esports athletes. Clinical norms are derived from patients receiving outpatient mental health services.

Test Methodology: Average scores are computed for the three overarching coping styles (Problem-Focused, Emotion-Focused, Avoidant), indicating the degree of engagement in each style. Interpretation utilizes both normative percentiles (based on non-clinical samples) and clinical percentiles (based on outpatient mental health clients).

Keywords

Psychological assessment, Stress management, Coping mechanisms, Health psychology, Clinical formulation, Normative data, Likert scale.

[quads id=5]

Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: N/A (Information not provided in source)

Affiliation Email addresses: N/A (Information not provided in source)

Correspondence Address: N/A (Information not provided in source)

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Brief-COPE was developed and published by Charles S. Carver in 1997 as an abbreviated version of the original COPE scale (1989). Information regarding current usage permissions and associated fees is not provided in the source material, but the scale is widely available for research purposes.

References

Carver, C. S. (1997). You want to measure coping but your protocol is too long: Consider the brief cope. International journal of behavioral medicine, 4(1), 92-100.

Carver, C. S., Scheier, M. F., & Weintraub, J. K. (1989). Assessing coping strategies: a theoretically based approach. Journal of personality and social psychology, 56(2), 267.

Dias, C., Cruz, J. F., and Fonseca, A. M. (2012). The relationship between multidimensional competitive anxiety, cognitive threat appraisal, and coping strategies: A multi-sport study. Int. J. Sport Exerc. Psychol. 10, 52–65. doi: 10.1080/1612197X.2012.645131

Eisenberg, S. A., Shen, B. J., Schwarz, E. R., & Mallon, S. (2012). Avoidant coping moderates the association between anxiety and patient-rated physical functioning in heart failure patients. Journal of behavioral medicine, 35(3), 253-261.

Hegarty & Buchanan (2021). Normative data compiled from patients receiving psychological intervention in outpatient settings (n = 3635) (Referenced via NovoPsych norms).

Poulus, D., Coulter, T. J., Trotter, M. G., & Polman, R. (2020). Stress and Coping in Esports and the Influence of Mental Toughness. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 628. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00628

[quads id=5]

Items of the Brief-COPE questionnaire (Brief-COPE)

The following questions ask how you have sought to cope with a hardship in your life. Read the statements and indicate how much you have been using each coping style.