Why coping styles matter
Stress is part of life. What changes from person to person is what you do once it shows up. Some people get moving on the problem. Some call a friend. Some wait it out, and some reach for a drink.
Psychologists call these habits coping strategies, and they are measurable. The Brief COPE is one of the shorter ways to measure them.
What the Brief COPE measures
Charles S. Carver published the Brief COPE in 1997, condensing an earlier 60-item questionnaire (Carver, Scheier & Weintraub, 1989) into 28 items. The title of the paper gives away the reason: "You want to measure coping but your protocol's too long." Researchers running clinical and field studies needed something people could finish in 5 to 10 minutes without losing the substance.
The 28 items form 14 subscales, two items each. Answers run from 1 ("I haven't been doing this at all") to 4 ("I've been doing this a lot"), and nothing is reverse-scored.
The subscales sit on Lazarus and Folkman's transactional model of stress (1984), which treats stress as an exchange between a person and a situation rather than a fixed trait. The usual grouping:
| Group | Subscales |
|---|---|
| Problem-focused | Active coping, planning, instrumental support, positive reframing |
| Emotion-focused | Emotional support, acceptance, humor, religion |
| Avoidant | Self-distraction, denial, behavioral disengagement, venting, substance use, self-blame |
Scoring, and a warning about totals
Each subscale scores from 2 to 8. Higher means you lean on that strategy more.
There is no total score. Carver is blunt about this: "There is no such thing as an 'overall' score on this measure." He also never published a rule for sorting subscales into adaptive and maladaptive groups, so any composite you see elsewhere came from someone else's data. Read the 14 scores as a profile.
Reliability and validity
In Carver's original study of hurricane survivors, subscale alphas ranged from .50 (venting) to .90 (substance use), with religion at .82, planning and humor at .73, and emotional support and self-distraction at .71. Two-item scales rarely do better than this, and Carver reported all of them at or above .50.
The 14-factor structure has held up in larger samples. García and colleagues (2018) tested it on 1,847 Chilean adults and got acceptable fit (CFI = .94, TLI = .91, RMSEA = .04) with strict measurement invariance across gender, meaning men and women were answering the same underlying items the same way. Their convergent patterns look sensible too: active coping and acceptance track with higher well-being and lower perceived stress, while self-blame, behavioral disengagement and substance use run the other direction.
Stability is more mixed. In a sample of 125 dementia caregivers (Cooper, Katona & Livingston, 2008), one-year retest ICCs were .71 for problem-focused coping, .64 for dysfunctional coping and .51 for emotion-focused coping. Two-year figures were .72, .59 and .44. That drop is worth remembering: coping is partly a habit and partly a response to circumstances, so scores move.
What this version adds
The test here has 34 items. The 28 from the original cover the 14 subscales above, and the rest cover three areas the original leaves out: mindful awareness, physical self-care and self-compassion. Results are grouped into the three broad styles from the table, and you also see each of the subscales separately.
Where it gets used
Clinical work is the most common setting: a therapist wants to know whether someone under pressure tends to withdraw, blame themselves, or ask for help, because that shapes what the treatment plan should focus on. Beyond that, the scale shows up in chronic illness research (cancer, cardiac, diabetes), occupational health studies of high-stress jobs, trauma and disaster research, and studies of how students handle academic pressure.
It suits adults from about 16 up, and no psychology background is needed to answer it. If you are in a rough stretch and want a clearer picture of how you respond to it, this is a reasonable place to start.
Take the test
You can complete the Brief COPE on CheckPsych for free. It takes about 5 to 8 minutes, and you will see where your coping profile sits across the 14 subscales and the three broad styles.
References
Carver, C. S. (1997). You want to measure coping but your protocol's 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), 267-283.
Cooper, C., Katona, C., & Livingston, G. (2008). Validity and reliability of the Brief COPE in carers of people with dementia: The LASER-AD Study. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 196(11), 838-843.
García, F. E., Barraza-Peña, C. G., Wlodarczyk, A., Alvear-Carrasco, M., & Reyes-Reyes, A. (2018). Psychometric properties of the Brief-COPE for the evaluation of coping strategies in the Chilean population. Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica, 31, 22.
Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer.
Disclaimer: This article and the Brief COPE are for general education and self-reflection. They are not a diagnosis or a treatment recommendation. Subscale scores describe coping habits, not mental health status. If you are struggling, a qualified professional can help.