Brief COPE: Coping strategy profile

What this assessment is

The Brief COPE is a 28-item self-report questionnaire about ways of coping with stress.

It reports 14 separate two-item subscales. It does not have one standard overall coping score.

Charles Carver developed the measure as a shorter version of the COPE inventory. The original 1997 paper describes both situation-specific and general coping uses.

The Brief COPE does not diagnose a mental health condition or classify a person as a good or bad coper.

It describes a pattern.

Who it was designed for

The original work studied adults responding to significant stress, including people affected by a hurricane and adults undergoing treatment for breast cancer.

Later studies have used the Brief COPE in many health, workplace, caregiving, and community settings.

Coping depends on context. A strategy that helps in one situation may be ineffective or harmful in another. Results should be interpreted for the stressor, population, language, and version being studied.

Stressors differ.

This page covers the original 28-item, 14-subscale Brief COPE.

Version matters.

How it is administered

The questionnaire can ask what a person has been doing about a specific stressor. It can also ask what they generally do when stressed.

Those are different instructions and should not be mixed.

Choose one.

The original response coding runs from 0 to 3. Many adaptations shift the same four response levels to 1 through 4.

Completion usually takes about 5 to 10 minutes. Use one instruction set and one coding system throughout.

Each subscale needs both of its responses for the standard score. There is no general published rule for replacing a missing response.

What it measures

The 14 subscales cover:

• self-distraction
• active coping
• denial
• substance use
• emotional support
• instrumental support
• behavioral disengagement
• venting
• positive reframing
• planning
• humor
• acceptance
• religion
• self-blame

The profile shows which strategies were endorsed more often. It does not show whether the underlying problem improved.

Outcomes need separate measurement.

The PSS-10 measures perceived stress. The CD-RISC-25 measures resilience resources. Neither one measures the same coping-strategy profile as Brief COPE.

How scoring works

Pair the two responses assigned to each subscale. Then add them or calculate their mean.

With the original 0-to-3 coding, each subscale sum ranges from 0 to 6. A subscale mean ranges from 0 to 3.

With a shifted 1-to-4 adaptation, each sum ranges from 2 to 8. That change does not mean the respondent used more coping strategies. It is a different coding convention.

Method matters.

Do not add all 28 responses into a standard overall total. Do not combine subscales into broad adaptive and maladaptive totals unless a specific study has defined and validated that structure.

Keep the subscales separate.

One total misleads.

How to interpret Brief COPE scores

A higher subscale score means that the person reported using that strategy more often under the stated instructions.

There are no universal low, normal, or high bands.

Context comes first.

Interpret the 14 scores as a profile. Name the stressor, timeframe or general instruction, coding range, and whether results are sums or means.

Be specific.

Avoid labeling a strategy as always helpful or always harmful. Acceptance may support adjustment to an unchangeable loss, for example, but serve a different purpose when a problem can be changed.

Changes over time can be useful when the same instructions and scoring method are repeated.

Coping can change.

What the score cannot tell you

Brief COPE cannot show whether a coping strategy worked.

Frequency is not success.

It cannot establish the intensity of the stressor, the resources available, or the person's mental health diagnosis.

Self-report can be affected by memory, insight, social expectations, and how broadly each strategy is understood.

A profile cannot prove that one strategy caused a better or worse outcome. Associations between coping and health can also reflect the severity and type of the problem being faced.

Evidence and limitations

The original paper supported a shorter measure that retained 14 coping distinctions from the longer COPE framework.

An independent factor study found that broader groupings can vary by population and analysis. This is one reason not to present a single adaptive or maladaptive scoring system as standard.

The measure is flexible, but flexibility reduces comparability when researchers change instructions, coding, translations, or subscale groupings.

Record the exact version, stressor, instructions, coding, subscale method, and missing-response rule with every result.