Assessment of cognitive coping styles: A closer look at situation-responseinventories

Cognitive coping style approaches establish two concepts central to the und erstanding of people's responses to a stressful situation: "attention" and "avoidance". Theoretical frameworks corresponding to these conceptions are Sensitization-Repression (Byrne, 1961), Monitoring -Blunting (Miller, 1980) , and Vigilance-Cognitive Avoidance (Krohne, 1986). Such types of cognitive coping styles are usually measured by means of situation-response inventor ies. rn the present article we take a closer look at this kind of coping as sessment by considering the scenarios, the coping options and response form ats, the dimensionality of the constructs, and published data on the reliab ility and the validity of seven, situation-response inventories. Three impo rtant points deserve to be highlighted: (a) it probably makes little sense to assess coping style using scenarios that diverge maximally with respect to controllability and predictability since coping is not assumed to show s uch complete cross-situational stability; (b) similarly named inventories r ely on largely different operationalizations and can hardly be considered a s measuring similar constructs; and (c) monitoring/vigilance and blunting/a voidance generally emerge as independent constructs, which argues against u se of summary scores. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd.