Ways of Coping checklist
The measurement instrument introduced in Folkman & Lazarus (1980) and, in later revised forms, one of the most widely used self-report measures in stress research. A checklist of coping thoughts and actions, answered about a specific stressful episode and scored into two functional categories: problem-focused and emotion-focused coping (see coping-problem-vs-emotion-focused).
Rationale
The checklist was built to escape the two dominant coping measures of its day, both of which Folkman & Lazarus judged inadequate: coping as a hierarchy of ego-defences (which confounds the coping process with its adaptational outcome and requires large inferential leaps to score) and coping as a personality trait (which assumes cross-situational consistency the data do not support). A checklist anchored to a concrete encounter lets coping be measured as what it is on the transactional view — a situated process that varies across encounters — and lets a person report the full, complex mix of strategies an encounter actually recruited.
As implemented in the founding study
68 items, binary (yes/no), each answered with a named stressful episode in mind; items drawn from the domains of defensive coping (avoidance, intellectualisation, isolation, suppression), information-seeking, problem-solving, palliation, direct action, and magical thinking. Classification into 27 problem-focused and 41 emotion-focused items was checked by an interdisciplinary group (91% agreement), by an experimental vignette study, by principal-components analysis, and by internal-consistency analysis (Cronbach’s α ≈ .80 P, .81 E), then conservatively revised to 24 P / 40 E.
Interpretive care
The instrument’s central caution is built into its own founding data: the same coping item can be problem-focused in one situation and emotion-focused in another (five items loaded against their assigned scale). Coping function is partly a property of the situation, not only of the act — so P and E scores are best read as within-episode profiles rather than as fixed trait scores, and the scales require re-validation in any new population. The measure records coping used, never coping that worked; efficacy is a separate question the 1980 study explicitly set aside.