In the past decade, a great deal of research has been done with the purpose of identifying adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies. A problem that has complicated this research is that a particular mode of coping that is effective for a particular person in a particular setting may be ineffective when used by the same person in another situation or by a different person in the same situation. One approach to this problem has been to attempt to microscopically study person-situation interactions. The difficulty with such an approach is that the interactions can be so complicated and so situationally specific that they make the task of extracting replicable, meaningful generalizations formidable, if not impossible (Cronbach, 1975; Epstein, 1980b). It is noteworthy, in this respect, that, having conducted an ambitious study of this kind, Folkman, Lazarus, Gruen, and DeLongis (1986), using what they refer to as a microanalytic approach, came to the following conclusion:.
By examining specific thoughts and acts, we assessed these processes at a relatively microanalytic level. Although this procedure is necessary in order to examine the functional relationships among these processes, informal observations of behavior suggest that people have characteristic ways of appraising and coping that transcend specific thoughts and acts, which a more abstract, macroanalytic approach might reveal. Unfortunately, traditional measures of coping style, such as repression-sensitization (Byrne, 1961), tend to be unidimensional and do not adequately capture the richness and complexity that characterize actual appraisal and coping processes. A major challenge in stress and coping research is to develop a method for describing stable styles of appraising and coping that does not sacrifice the cognitive and behavioral richness of these processes (Folkman & Lazarus, 1981). At this higher level of abstraction the links between appraisal, coping and outcomes such as psychological symptoms should become clearer.