Limited correspondence between daily coping reports and restrospective coping recall.

College students (N = 173) provided daily crying reports for 7 days prior to the first class exam. Five days after the exam, students were asked to report on their exam-related coping. By combining daily and retrospective measurement procedures, the authors were able to examine the degree of correspondence between retrospective self-reports and reports made during the time the event was unfolding. A notable decrement in correspondence was observed in comparison with a condition in which the 2 measures (the Coping Strategy Indicator and the Definitional Coping Inventory) were used retrospectively to assess crying with a prior stressful event. In the best case (Problem Solving), the correlation between daily and retrospective measures was.58, indicating that students were only moderately accurate in their coping strategy recall