Ways of Coping Scale (Revised)

1. Abstract

The Ways of Coping Scale (Revised) (often abbreviated as WOCS or WOC-R) is one of the most widely utilized and foundational psychometric instruments designed to evaluate the cognitive and behavioral strategies individuals employ to manage specific internal and external stressors. Developed by Susan Folkman and Richard S. Lazarus, the instrument operationalizes the transactional model of stress and coping, shifting the conceptualization of coping from a static personality trait to a dynamic, situation-specific process that unfolds over time. The revised inventory comprises 66 items scored on a 4-point Likert-type scale ranging from 0 (Not Used) to 3 (Used A great deal).

Extensive psychometric investigations have identified stable multi-dimensional structures across diverse populations. In adult community samples, empirical factor analyses delineate eight primary subscales: Confrontive Coping, Distancing, Self-Controlling, Seeking Social Support, Accepting Responsibility, Escape-Avoidance, Planful Problem-Solving, and Positive Reappraisal. In college student and specialized academic cohorts, an alternative eight-factor empirical derivation captures dimensions termed Problem-Focused Coping, Wishful Thinking, Detachment, Seeking Social Support, Focusing on the Positive, Self-Blame, Tension Reduction, and Keep to Self. Internal consistency estimates across subscales demonstrate moderate to strong reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients generally falling between .59 and .88 depending on sample characteristics and situational contexts. The instrument displays solid construct, convergent, concurrent, and predictive validity across health psychology, behavioral medicine, occupational stress research, and clinical psychopathology, maintaining its status as a cornerstone assessment in behavioral science.

2. Keywords

Ways of Coping Scale, WOC-R, Susan Folkman, Richard Lazarus, transactional stress model, cognitive appraisal, problem-focused coping, emotion-focused coping, psychological assessment, psychometrics, stress management, coping strategies

3. Authors

The Ways of Coping Scale and its revised variants were authored by Susan Folkman, Ph.D., and Richard S. Lazarus, Ph.D. (1922–2002), operating within the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Subsequent validation studies involved distinguished collaborators in behavioral medicine, including Christine Dunkel-Schetter, Ph.D. (University of California, Los Angeles), Anita DeLongis, Ph.D. (University of British Columbia), and Rand J. Gruen, Ph.D.

During the developmental phase of the scale, Dr. Folkman served as an Associate Research Psychologist at UC Berkeley and later became Professor of Medicine and Director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Lazarus was a seminal figure in twentieth-century psychology, internationally celebrated for establishing the transactional paradigm of stress, appraisal, and affective regulation.

4. Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Ways of Coping Scale (Revised) is to quantify the thoughts and actions individuals enlist in confronting the demands of a specific stressful encounter. Unlike traditional personality inventories that classify individuals into rigid coping typologies (such as repressor versus sensitizer), the WOCS was engineered to measure coping as a process. This conceptual shift emphasizes what an individual actually thinks or does within a delineated transactional context, how those cognitive and behavioral efforts fluctuate across varying situational demands, and how specific coping configurations correlate with adaptive or maladaptive psychological and somatic outcomes.

In clinical psychology and behavioral medicine, the WOCS serves critical diagnostic and treatment-planning objectives. Clinicians employ the instrument to determine whether a client suffering from affective disorders, chronic somatic illness, or acute life crisis relies predominantly on maladaptive escape-avoidance behaviors or utilizes constructive, planful problem-solving. Identifying these baseline strategies allows psychotherapists to deliver tailored interventions—such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), acceptance-based paradigms, or stress inoculation training—to foster emotional resilience, cognitive restructuring, and efficacious problem resolution.

In applied research contexts, the scale provides an empirical framework for examining interactions between primary/secondary cognitive appraisals and coping outcomes. Investigators across organizational psychology, oncology, cardiovascular medicine, and developmental science use the WOCS to track coping trajectories across longitudinal intervals, evaluate the efficacy of workplace stress reduction programs, and assess how dyadic support mechanisms mitigate psychological distress.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct underlying the Ways of Coping Scale is coping, formally defined by Folkman and Lazarus as the constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person. Coping efforts are multidimensional, serving two broad primary functions: altering the troubled person-environment relationship (problem-focused coping) and regulating emotional distress (emotion-focused coping). In the Revised 66-item scale, these broad functions are delineated into fine-grained subscales.

Community Sample Dimensions

Empirical analyses across adult community populations have established eight distinct dimensions:

• Confrontive Coping: Aggressive, assertive efforts to alter the situation, often characterized by risk-taking and interpersonal hostility (e.g., standing ground, taking risks, expressing anger directly).
• Distancing: Cognitive efforts to detach oneself from the stressful encounter and minimize its emotional significance (e.g., making light of the problem, going on as if nothing occurred).
• Self-Controlling: Efforts to regulate one’s feelings and actions, maintaining composure and inhibiting impulsive behaviors (e.g., keeping feelings to oneself, preventing emotions from interfering with tasks).
• Seeking Social Support: Informational, instrumental, and emotional mobilization of interpersonal networks (e.g., asking for advice, talking to individuals with concrete authority, obtaining sympathy).
• Accepting Responsibility: Acknowledging one’s own role in generating or maintaining the stressful difficulty, coupled with efforts to rectify mistakes (e.g., criticizing oneself, apologizing, promising self-improvement).
• Escape-Avoidance: Behavioral and cognitive strategies aimed at escaping or evading the stressor entirely, often through fantasy or tangible avoidance (e.g., daydreaming, sleeping, using substances, hoping for miracles).
• Planful Problem-Solving: Deliberate, analytical, problem-focused strategies aimed at methodically changing the objective stressor (e.g., formulating and following a plan of action, analyzing the root problem).
• Positive Reappraisal: Cognitive reframing directed toward extracting personal growth, spiritual strength, or renewed meaning from the adversity (e.g., finding new faith, rediscovering what matters, changing oneself positively).

Student Sample Dimensions

In academic or developmental contexts, such as college student cohorts facing evaluation stressors (e.g., examinations), the items group into a parallel eight-factor matrix reflecting specific developmental stressors:

• Problem-Focused Coping: Comprehensive analytical planning, effort doubling, and targeted action execution to resolve academic or personal hurdles.
• Wishful Thinking: Cognitive yearning for magical resolutions or alternate realities to replace current acute pressures.
• Detachment: Behavioral or psychological distancing from the immediate stressor, accompanied by reliance on temporal drift or fatalistic acceptance.
• Seeking Social Support: Reaching out to academic peers, family, or professionals for emotional solace and instrumental direction.
• Focusing on the Positive: Cognitive attempts to highlight constructive aspects, silver linings, and personal enrichment.
• Self-Blame: Internalization of failure attributions, lecturing oneself, and acknowledging personal shortcomings.
• Tension Reduction: Physical or behavioral attempts to discharge affective pressure, including taking vacations, consuming substances, or physical exercise.
• Keep to Self: Secrecy and social withdrawal, preventing others from discovering the extent of the stressful predicament.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Ways of Coping Scale is grounded in the Cognitive-Mediational Theory of Stress formulated by Richard S. Lazarus and elaborated in collaboration with Susan Folkman (1984). This paradigm posits that stress does not reside solely within the environment (as an objective environmental stimulus) nor solely within the person (as an innate physiological response pattern). Rather, psychological stress is an emergent property of a dynamic, bidirectional transaction between the person and the environment.

Central to this theoretical framework are two sequential yet reciprocal cognitive appraisal processes:

1. Primary Appraisal: The individual evaluates the stakes of the encounter. The event is categorized as irrelevant, benign-positive, or stressful. Stressful appraisals are further subdivided into harm/loss (damage already sustained), threat (anticipated future harm or loss), or challenge (opportunity for growth, mastery, or gain).
2. Secondary Appraisal: Following or concurrent with primary appraisal, the individual evaluates what coping options are available, whether a given coping strategy can be applied effectively, and what the likely consequences of utilizing that strategy will be. This involves evaluating personal resources, social supports, material assets, and perceived controllability.

Coping processes serve as the crucial mediator connecting appraisal processes to immediate outcomes (such as emotional states and physiological responses) and long-term adaptational outcomes (such as psychological well-being, functional somatic health, and social functioning). Lazarus and Folkman explicitly rejected drive-reduction models and psychoanalytic ego-defense hierarchies, arguing instead that coping includes conscious, effortful actions that vary according to perceived situational controllability. When an encounter is appraised as amenable to change, individuals are statistically more likely to mobilize planful, problem-focused strategies; when an encounter is appraised as unchangeable, emotion-focused strategies like distancing, positive reappraisal, or acceptance predominate.

7. Validity

The construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the Ways of Coping Scale (Revised) have been demonstrated across hundreds of empirical investigations in psychological and medical research.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity was established through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses documenting that items reliably cluster into distinct problem-focused and emotion-focused modalities rather than collapsing into a unitary general factor. Factorial validity has been replicated across varied cultural contexts, proving that the multi-dimensional structure reflects authentic behavioral and cognitive responses to stress.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

The WOCS demonstrates robust convergent validity through predictable correlations with established personality and affective constructs. Folkman, Lazarus, Dunkel-Schetter, DeLongis, and Gruen (1986) demonstrated that subscales such as Escape-Avoidance and Accepting Responsibility correlate positively with measures of psychological distress, depressive symptoms (assessed via the Beck Depression Inventory), and trait anxiety (assessed via the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory). Conversely, Planful Problem-Solving and Positive Reappraisal demonstrate significant positive associations with internal locus of control, generalized self-efficacy, and positive affect.

Discriminant validity is evidenced by weak to negligible correlations between WOCS subscales and social desirability measures (such as the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale), verifying that self-reported coping behaviors reflect actual process-level responses rather than mere impression management or defensive posturing.

Predictive and Ecological Validity

The predictive utility of the WOCS is well-documented in longitudinal research. In their 1985 study tracking college students across three stages of an academic examination (preparation, waiting for grades, and grade notification), Folkman and Lazarus showed that coping profiles systematically shifted in response to the changing demands of the situation, directly predicting subsequent emotional states. Studies in medical cohorts (e.g., oncology, cardiology, chronic pain) demonstrate that high baseline scores on Escape-Avoidance prospectively predict lower treatment adherence and poorer health-related quality of life, whereas Positive Reappraisal prospectively predicts psychological resilience and post-traumatic growth.

8. Reliability

Internal consistency of the Ways of Coping Scale has been extensively evaluated across multiple populations, showing satisfactory to high reliability coefficients across most subscales:

Community Sample Reliability Estimates

In community-based studies (Folkman et al., 1986), Cronbach’s alpha values for the eight factors demonstrate sound reliability:

• Positive Reappraisal: α = .79
• Seeking Social Support: α = .76
• Escape-Avoidance: α = .72
• Confrontive Coping: α = .70
• Self-Controlling: α = .70
• Planful Problem-Solving: α = .68
• Accepting Responsibility: α = .66
• Distancing: α = .61

Student Sample Reliability Estimates

In college student cohorts evaluated across acute evaluative stressors (Folkman & Lazarus, 1985), internal consistency coefficients showed comparable or superior strength:

• Problem-Focused Coping: α = .88
• Wishful Thinking: α = .86
• Seeking Social Support: α = .82
• Self-Blame: α = .76
• Detachment: α = .74
• Focusing on the Positive: α = .70
• Keep to Self: α = .65
• Tension Reduction: α = .59

Test-Retest Stability Considerations

Because the Ways of Coping Scale is designed to evaluate coping as an evolving process rather than an unvarying trait, high traditional test-retest reliability is neither theoretically expected nor psychometrically desirable when measured across different stressors. When the same specific stressful encounter is reassessed across brief intervals (e.g., 48 to 72 hours), test-retest coefficients range between .65 and .82, indicating stable measurement of a discrete event while maintaining sensitivity to changing situational contingencies over extended periods.

9. Factor Analysis

The factorial structure of the Ways of Coping Scale (Revised) was established using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) with principal factoring and oblique (Oblimin) or orthogonal (Varimax) rotations to allow for expected correlations among real-world coping efforts.

In the seminal 1986 investigation by Folkman, Lazarus, Dunkel-Schetter, DeLongis, and Gruen involving 150 community-dwelling adults assessed monthly across five months, principal factor analysis of 66 items extracted eight distinct factors accounting for substantial total variance. Items were retained on specific subscales if they met strict retention criteria, including primary factor loadings ≥ .35 and minimal cross-loadings:

• Confrontive Coping: Comprises items 6, 7, 17, 28, 34, and 46. Items load strongly on assertive, outward affective action (e.g., item 46: “Stood my ground and fought for what I wanted”).
• Distancing: Comprises items 12, 13, 15, 21, 41, and 44. Characterized by cognitive detaching (e.g., item 41: “Didn’t let it get to me; refused to think too much about it”).
• Self-Controlling: Comprises items 10, 14, 35, 43, 54, 63, and 64. Items capture emotional restraint and deliberate behavioral inhibition (e.g., item 54: “I tried to keep my feelings from interfering with other things too much”).
• Seeking Social Support: Comprises items 8, 18, 22, 31, 42, and 45. Items reflect mobilization of both informational advice and affective empathy (e.g., item 42: “I asked a relative or friend I respected for advice”).
• Accepting Responsibility: Comprises items 9, 25, 29, and 51. Items center on internal attribution of culpability (e.g., item 29: “Realized I brought the problem on myself”).
• Escape-Avoidance: Comprises items 11, 16, 33, 40, 47, 50, 58, and 59. Items emphasize behavioral withdrawal and wish-fulfillment fantasies (e.g., item 58: “Wished that the situation would go away or somehow be over with”).
• Planful Problem-Solving: Comprises items 1, 26, 39, 48, 49, and 52. Characterized by systematic problem remediation (e.g., item 26: “I made a plan of action and followed it”).
• Positive Reappraisal: Comprises items 20, 23, 30, 36, 38, 56, and 60. Items emphasize existential, spiritual, and cognitive reframing (e.g., item 38: “Rediscovered what is important in life”).

Subsequent Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) conducted across diverse populations have generally affirmed the eight-factor architecture. Model fit indices across well-controlled studies typically show acceptable parameters (CFI > .90, TLI > .88, RMSEA ≤ .06), confirming that while individual coping items share common variances, they reflect separate, functionally distinct dimensions of human stress regulation.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Complete Test Name: Ways of Coping Scale (Revised) (WOCS / WOC-R)
• Authors: Susan Folkman, Ph.D., and Richard S. Lazarus, Ph.D.
• Construct Measured: Context-specific cognitive and behavioral coping processes
• Test Type: Standardized self-report inventory
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil or computerized/interactive digital assessment
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents aged 16 years and older
• Item Count: 66 items (comprising core scored items across primary dimensions plus supplementary exploratory items)
• Response Scale: 4-point Likert scale:
  • 0 = Not Used
  • 1 = Used Somewhat
  • 2 = Used Quite A Bit
  • 3 = Used A great deal
• Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes
• Scoring Modalities:
  • Raw Subscale Scores: Calculated by summing the numerical ratings of the items assigned to each subscale. Raw scores evaluate the absolute intensity of each coping category.
  • Relative Scores: Calculated by dividing the mean score of a subscale by the sum of the mean scores across all subscales, yielding a percentage that indicates the proportional contribution of that coping strategy relative to the individual’s overall coping effort.
• Subscale Item Composition (Community Sample):
  • Confrontive Coping: Items 6, 7, 17, 28, 34, 46
  • Distancing: Items 12, 13, 15, 21, 41, 44
  • Self-Controlling: Items 10, 14, 35, 43, 54, 63, 64
  • Seeking Social Support: Items 8, 18, 22, 31, 42, 45
  • Accepting Responsibility: Items 9, 25, 29, 51
  • Escape-Avoidance: Items 11, 16, 33, 40, 47, 50, 58, 59
  • Planful Problem-Solving: Items 1, 26, 39, 48, 49, 52
  • Positive Reappraisal: Items 20, 23, 30, 36, 38, 56, 60
• Subscale Item Composition (Student Sample):
  • Problem-Focused Coping: Items 2, 26, 35, 39, 46, 48, 49, 52, 54, 62, 64
  • Wishful Thinking: Items 11, 55, 57, 58, 59
  • Detachment: Items 4, 12, 13, 21, 24, 53
  • Seeking Social Support: Items 8, 18, 28, 31, 42, 45, 60
  • Focusing on the Positive: Items 15, 20, 23, 38
  • Self-Blame: Items 9, 29, 51
  • Tension Reduction: Items 32, 33, 66
  • Keep to Self: Items 14, 40, 43

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The original iteration of the Ways of Coping Checklist was published in 1980, followed by the definitive Ways of Coping Scale (Revised) published in 1985 and 1986. The scale and its testing manuals have been administered internationally across research and clinical applications for decades.

Commercial distribution, standardized manuals, and official licensing of the Ways of Coping Questionnaire were historically managed by Mind Garden, Inc. (www.mindgarden.com), which holds registered distribution rights for specific formatted manuals and scoring packages. However, academic researchers, graduate students, and clinical investigators may access the original research versions archived through University of California historical repositories and non-commercial institutional collections for scholarly, empirical, and educational purposes. Researchers planning to utilize the scale in published investigations are advised to verify current institutional licensing parameters or contact rights holders to ensure compliance with copyright requirements.

12. References

Folkman, S., & Lazarus, R. S. (1980). An analysis of coping in a middle-aged community sample. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 21(3), 219–239. https://doi.org/10.2307/2136617

Folkman, S., & Lazarus, R. S. (1985). If it changes it must be a process: Study of emotion and coping during three stages of a college examination. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48(1), 150–170. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.48.1.150

Folkman, S., & Lazarus, R. S. (1988). Manual for the Ways of Coping Questionnaire. Consulting Psychologists Press.

Folkman, S., Lazarus, R. S., Dunkel-Schetter, C., DeLongis, A., & Gruen, R. J. (1986). Dynamics of a stressful encounter: Cognitive appraisal, coping, and encounter outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(5), 992–1003. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.50.5.992

Folkman, S., Lazarus, R. S., Gruen, R. J., & DeLongis, A. (1986). Appraisal, coping, health status, and psychological symptoms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(3), 571–579. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.50.3.571

Lazarus, R. S. (1993). From psychological stress to the emotions: A history of changing outlooks. Annual Review of Psychology, 44(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ps.44.020193.000245

Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer Publishing Company.

13. Items of the Scale