Examining the overlap between resiliency and coping measures

Resilience and coping are two distinct psychological concepts, but they are often used interchangeably in the literature (Morales-Rodriguez et al., 2021). Resilience is the ability to return to a pre-exposure physiological and psychological state during and immediately after an event, and coping is the behavior that an individual may engage in to manage stressors (Rice & Liu, 2016a). Research has consistently reported a relation between resilience and coping styles (Rice & Liu, 2016b; Wu et al., 2020); however, it is unclear if widely used measures of resilience and coping may be measuring the same construct rather than unique facets of the two constructs. This study examined associations among frequently used measures of resilience and coping to determine how much overlap may be present. Participants were 237 students at a suburban commuter campus in Houston, Texas, and data were collected during the Fall 2022 semester. Participants were 18 – 65 years of age (M = 24.80, SD = 7.61), racially/ethnically diverse (37.34% Hispanic/Latinx/Spanish, 33.48% White/Caucasian, 10.30% Multiracial, 8.58% African American/Black/African, 6.44% Asian), and predominantly cisgender female (73.82%). Participants completed an online self-report survey including common resilience (i.e., CD-RISC 27, Resiliency Appraisal Scale, and Brief Resilience Scale) and coping (i.e., Brief-COPE Questionnaire and Brief Resilient Coping Scale) measures. Even though there were significant correlations among many of the measures (r’s = -.36 - .61, all p’s < .05), with effect sizes ranging from small to large, results suggest that the measures captured at least some unique aspects of the constructs. Future research would benefit from examining individual items in the measures to further understand what is shared and what is unique in commonly used measures of resilience and coping, as well as how to use these results in an operationalized way for individuals outside of trauma-informed care.