Coping Resources Inventory for Stress

Coping refers to conscious or unconscious efforts to manage internal and external demands or situations that are appraised as taxing one's personal resources. Instruments measuring coping usually fall into one of two categories: those measuring coping processes and those measuring coping resources.

While coping processes are thoughts or behaviors occurring after stressful events have occurred, coping resources are factors in place before such stressors occur. Coping resources may include psychological traits, cognitive skills, belief systems, social support, physical health and fitness, and financial resources.

The Coping Resources Inventory for Stress (CRIS) is a comprehensive measure of personal resources for coping with stress. The CRIS offers 15 resource measures, an overall coping effectiveness measure, five validity keys, and a computer-generated interpretative report that suggests ways of strengthening deficit resources. The resource scales are self-disclosure, self-direction, confidence, acceptance, social support, financial freedom, physical health, physical fitness, stress monitoring, tension control, structuring, problem solving, cognitive restructuring, functional beliefs, and social ease.

The 280 true-false items of the CRIS were distilled from more than 700 items responded to by more than 3,500 participants during a 12-year period. Contributing to the development of the inventory were disparate group studies, factor analyses, item analyses, item bias studies, reliability coefficients, and meta-analytic reviews. The normative sample (n = 1,199) was selected to be representative of the United States population in terms of race, gender, and age. The CRIS may be administered using test booklets or by computer.

The CRIS scales have relatively high internal consistency reliabilities (.84 to .97; Mdn = .88; n = 814), test-retest reliabilities (.76 to .95 over a 4-week period; Mdn = .87; n = 34 college students), and moderate to low intercorrelations (range .05 to .62; Mdn = .33). These features allow the CRIS to be used as an inventory offering stable measures of subconstructs that all contribute to one superordinate construct, coping resources. Some of the studies for establishing the validity of the inventory include measures of illness, emotional distress, personality type, drug dependency, occupational choice, acculturation, and life satisfaction. The CRIS is published by Datamax Corporation, Atlanta, Georgia.