Coping With the Social Environment: The Relationship Between Life Events, Coping Strategies and Psychological Distress

The aims of this paper are to distinguish between effective and ineffective coping strategies for dealing with adverse life events occurring in different domains of a person's environment; to identify persons most at risk for deploying ineffective strategies; and to indicate interventions designed to promote effective strategies and limit the use of ineffective strategies. Recent research has suggested that different strategies may be effective for dealing with different events (stressors) and, in particular, that instrumental strategies are effective for events which present mainly cognitive problems; that affective strategies are effective for emotional problems and that avoidance strategies may be effective for uncontrollable events. Adverse events in three domains are considered in this paper: job and financial events, health events and personal relationship events. The evidence indicates that instrumental strategies are effective for all these events, that affective regulation strategies are ineffective, and that avoidance strategies are harmful. Data come from two waves of an Australian panel study (1983–85; n = 734). Respondents completed a life events inventory and were then shown a list of coping strategies and asked how they had coped with the most serious problem they had faced in the last two years. Effective coping was defined as coping which led to minimal increases in psychological distress (PD). Women, people of higher socio‐economic status (SES) and people who rated high on the traits warmth and openness to feelings more frequently used effective instrumental strategies. People who rated high on neuroticism and openness to feelings were more likely to use avoidance strategies.