Coping Styles Test: The 28 Brief COPE Items, Scored Three Ways

How this coping styles test is scored

The Brief COPE has 28 statements, each rated from 1 (I haven't been doing this at all) to 4 (I've been doing this a lot). Carver's scoring pairs them into 14 two-item strategies, with no reverse scoring: self-distraction (statements 1 and 19), active coping (2 and 7), denial (3 and 8), substance use (4 and 11), use of emotional support (5 and 15), use of instrumental support (10 and 23), behavioral disengagement (6 and 16), venting (9 and 21), positive reframing (12 and 17), planning (14 and 25), humor (18 and 28), acceptance (20 and 24), religion (22 and 27), and self-blame (13 and 26). Your own top strategies are the pairs you rated highest; the statements you marked 3 or 4 tell you which they are.

This page then groups the 14 strategies into three styles, following the three composites that Cooper, Katona, Orrell and Livingston introduced in 2006 and many researchers have used since: problem-focused coping (active coping, planning, instrumental support), emotion-focused coping (emotional support, positive reframing, acceptance, religion, humor), and the composite they call dysfunctional coping, which we label avoidant (self-distraction, denial, venting, substance use, behavioral disengagement, self-blame). Each style is scored as a percentage of its maximum, so the styles compare fairly even though they contain different numbers of strategies. Your result names the leading style. It is important to be honest about what that grouping is: Carver's own position is that there is no overall score on the Brief COPE and no recommended way to derive a dominant coping style for a person; he examines each strategy separately. A 2022 systematic review found many different higher-order structures across studies. The three styles here are an educational reading informed by one well-cited solution, not a validated scoring rule.

Coping is situational, and no style is bad everywhere

Coping research since Lazarus and Folkman has treated coping as a response to a particular situation rather than a fixed personality trait, and the Brief COPE is written that way: its instructions ask what you have been doing to deal with one specific stressor. That means your result describes how you have coped with the situation you had in mind, and it may look different for a different problem. People commonly plan and take action at work, seek support and reframe when a relationship is in trouble, and distract or disengage when facing something they cannot change. That flexibility is not inconsistency; it is what good coping looks like.

It also means no style is wrong in every context. Problem-focused coping is powerful when a situation can be changed and frustrating when it cannot; trying to fix a terminal diagnosis or another adult's choices is a recipe for exhaustion. Emotion-focused strategies such as acceptance and reframing are exactly what unchangeable situations call for. Even avoidant strategies have a place: distraction gets people through a chemotherapy session or a long wait for news, humor keeps a hard week bearable, and venting to a friend is often the first step toward support. The strategies in the avoidant group become costly when they are the only tools in use, when they stop you from acting on something that could be changed, or, in the case of substance use, when they carry a risk of their own.

What research links to better outcomes

Across hundreds of studies using the COPE and Brief COPE, the strategies most consistently associated with lower distress and better adjustment are active coping, planning, positive reframing, acceptance, and the use of emotional and instrumental support. The strategies most consistently associated with more distress over time are denial, behavioral disengagement, self-blame, and substance use. Self-distraction and venting sit in the middle: mildly helpful in the short term, unhelpful when they become the main response. In Carver's original Brief COPE paper, drawn from a community sample recovering from Hurricane Andrew, these same patterns held.

Two cautions keep this honest. First, the direction of the relationship is not always clear: people in worse situations may rely more on avoidant strategies because there is less they can do, so a high avoidant score partly reflects the problem rather than causing it. Second, support-seeking and religion vary with culture, personality, and what is available, and a low score on them is not a deficit. If your situation has been long and draining, our Stress Level Test and Burnout Test can show how much it has cost you, and our Resilience Test looks at the resources you are drawing on.

Building a wider repertoire, and what to do next

The most useful thing to take from this result is not the label but the gap: which strategies you rated 1 or 2 that would fit the situation you are in. If you lean avoidant, the smallest effective step is usually one problem-focused move on the part of the situation you can influence, however small, because action tends to shrink the sense of threat that drives avoidance. If you lean problem-focused and feel exhausted, the missing piece is often acceptance of the part you cannot change, and letting someone support you rather than only advise you. If you lean emotion-focused, check whether there is a practical step you have been reframing your way around.

Our coping skills resource lists concrete strategies by category, and our Mindfulness Test looks at the attention skills that make acceptance and reframing easier to use under pressure. If your coping has started to feel like it is making things worse, if you rated the substance-use statements at 3 or 4, or if the situation you had in mind is not going to end soon, a therapist who works with stress can help you widen the repertoire deliberately, which is something research suggests most people can do.

For a narrower look at reappraisal and suppression, try Emotion Regulation Test: Reappraisal vs Suppression; those two habits are only part of the wider coping picture.

Methodology & sources

This test reproduces the Brief COPE (Carver, 1997) in full: all 28 items, word for word, in their published order, rated on the published four-point scale from 1 (I haven't been doing this at all) to 4 (I've been doing this a lot). The Brief COPE is an abbreviated form of the 60-item COPE Inventory (Carver, Scheier and Weintraub, 1989), with two items for each of 14 strategies and no reverse scoring. Carver's page at the University of Miami states that the scales may be used freely and that the instructions may be adapted to the time frame of interest; we have shortened the instructions to ask about a recent stressful situation and left the items unchanged.

The three styles reported here are not part of Carver's scoring. They follow the three composites that Cooper, Katona, Orrell and Livingston used in 2006 and that many researchers have used since: problem-focused (active coping, planning, instrumental support), emotion-focused (emotional support, positive reframing, acceptance, religion, humor), and the composite those authors call dysfunctional, which we label avoidant because the strategies in it work by moving away from the stressor (self-distraction, denial, venting, substance use, behavioral disengagement, self-blame). Other teams group the same 14 strategies differently: several place positive reframing with problem-focused coping and venting and self-blame with emotion-focused coping, so the style labels are a reading of the strategies, not a property of them. Carver explicitly states that there is no overall score on this measure and recommends no way of generating a dominant coping style, and Solberg and colleagues' 2022 systematic review found a wide range of factor solutions across samples. Our three-style result is therefore an educational reading built on validated items, not a validated scoring rule, and the leading style is reported with the other two shown alongside it.

This is a screening tool for education and self-reflection. It describes how you have been coping with one situation, not a fixed trait, and it does not screen for any disorder. Each style is scored as a percentage of its own maximum so the three compare fairly despite containing different numbers of strategies.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the item wording against Carver's published Brief COPE and the three-style grouping so the page is explicit that the grouping is educational and that no coping style is harmful in every situation. Last reviewed October 5, 2026.

References

1. Carver CS. You want to measure coping but your protocol's too long: Consider the Brief COPE. Int J Behav Med. 1997;4(1):92-100. doi.org/10.1207/s15327558ijbm0401_6
2. Carver CS. Brief COPE. University of Miami, Department of Psychology. psy.miami.edu/faculty/ccarver/brief-cope.html
3. Carver CS, Scheier MF, Weintraub JK. Assessing coping strategies: A theoretically based approach. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1989;56(2):267-283. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.56.2.267
4. Cooper C, Katona C, Orrell M, Livingston G. Coping strategies and anxiety in caregivers of people with Alzheimer's disease: the LASER-AD study. J Affect Disord. 2006;90(1):15-20. doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2005.08.017
5. Solberg MA, Gridley MK, Peters RM. The factor structure of the Brief COPE: A systematic review. West J Nurs Res. 2022;44(6):612-627. doi.org/10.1177/01939459211012044

Coping Styles Test (Brief COPE) FAQ