Identifying Type Of Coping Flexibility Of College Freshmen And Exploring Its Relation To College Adaptation

Which coping strategy is more appropriate for a person in dealing with stress affairs? This is a core question for the psychologists who study "locus of control" and coping. In recent 20 years, researchers turned their attention to the fitness of Situation-Coping Strategy in which Coping Flexibility aroused many researchers' interests. Due to ambiguousness of the concept there is not so much valuable progress in this field in past. In 2001, Cecilia Cheng defined Coping flexibility in her papers firstly as (a) variability in cognitive appraisal and coping patterns across stressful situations,(b) a good fit between the nature of coping strategies and situational demands, and (c) subjective evaluation of effectiveness in attaining the desired goals. Derived from The-Goodness-of-Fit hypothesis, Cecilia differentiated five types of Coping Flexibility according to Cognitive appraisal and Coping pattern: (a), flexible; (b), active-inflexible; (c), passive- inflexible; (d), active-inconsistent; (e), passive-inconsistent.In this study, four types of coping flexibility (flexible, active-inflexible, passive-inflexible and passive-inconsistent) in college freshman were identified based on CFQ. Besides self-report measure, another laboratory task was used to verify the types of coping flexibility. It was disclosed that the characteristic of four types match the types introduced before, whereas some difference was found.In exploring the relation between three factors (gender, different types of coping flexibility and where freshman came from) and college adaptation, It was found the latter two factors were related to college adaptation at significant level, but interaction effect of them was not found.