STABILITY OF COPING IN HONG-KONG MEDICAL-STUDENTS - A LONGITUDINAL-STUDY

This study explores self-reported coping preferences of students in me dical school over time. A coping instrument that includes 12 subscales was used with 121 students in Hong Kong who responded to these and ot her inventories at two points in time within 8 months. Beyond the desc ription of mean differences, several methodological issues of coping a ssessment are raised, in particular the issues of stability, generalit y, and dimensionality of psychometric scales to measure coping. It tur ned out that the stability over time was very low, which might be seen as evidence for more situation-dependent than personality-dependent c oping. In principal component analyses, different coping dimensions em erged at Time 1 and Time 2. In regression analyses, subsequent coping strategies could hardly be predicted by antecedent coping strategies. The pattern of results supports the view that coping assessment might be of limited value when done in a trait-like manner. Rather, situatio n-oriented coping assessment strategies might be more valid.