Commentaries on The Utility of Systems Models of Stress and Coping for Applied Research: The Case of Cancer Adaptation by

somerfield (this i s sue) calls for a basic shift in the focus of coping research. He points to the need for a more systemic conceptualization of stress and coping processes, the organization of studies of coping around homogeneous stressors, and the adoption of a pragmatic, microanalytic approach to both coping assessment and the analysis of the resulting data. His examples drawn from the study of cancer patients facing bone-marrow transplant highlight the absurdity of organizing coping assessments around broader questions such as ‘What did you do to cope with your cancer?’ or even around respondents’ selection of their most stressful recent experiences in broad categories such as ‘cancer’ or ‘treatment’. If more researchers similarly stopped to contemplate exactly what they were asking of respondents, fewer studies of coping would be undertaken with no loss in the accumulation of knowledge. I can find little with which to disagree in his article, except his apparent optimism about coping researchers heeding his highly reasonable suggestions. Research using the Revised Ways of Coping Checklist (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) or instruments derived from it has a life of its own. The sheer accumulation of studies has set a methodological standard and the mindlessly repetitious use of these instruments has been confused with the establishment of their validity. Coping researchers have not yet been deterred by hundreds of studies which tell us little about coping that is not trivial or misleading. What Somerfield has to say needs to be said, but I do not think it will be sufficient to force the razing of the conceptual and methodological slum which coping research has become. It is far too easy for researchers to continue to publish studies based on the administration of checklists to diverse and heterogeneous samples with little or no insight into the predicaments of the individual respondents who are being considered. Somerfield opens with a call for a construal of coping as a ‘dynamic, interactional process’. This echoes the earliest writings of the Berkeley Stress and Coping Project (Coyne & Lazarus, 1979; Lazarus & Launier, 1978). The notion of stress and coping as an interactional (or transactional; see Coyne & Gottlieb, [1996] for a discussion of the distinction) process remains largely undeveloped beyond such rhetoric. Indeed, the persistent assumption that standardized coping checklists are actualizing such a conceptualization in some meaningful way stands in the way of a more sober assessment. The original Ways of Coping (Coyne, Aldwin, & Lazarus, 1981; Folkman & Lazarus, 1980) and its revisions (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) should have been seen as first steps, not the best Journal of Health Psychology Copyright g 1997 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, ISSN: 1359–1053 Vol 2(2) 153–172