Blackwell Science, LtdOxford, UKAJSPAsian Journal of Social Psychology1367-22232004 Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd with the Asian

Association of Social Psychology and the Japanese Group Dynamics Association 2004
April 2004715566Original ArticleFlexible coping responsesYiqun Gan
et al.

Asian Journal of Social Psychology (2004) 7: 55–66

Flexible coping responses to severe acute

respiratory syndrome-related and daily life
stressful events

Yiqun Gan, Ying Liu and Yiling Zhang

Peking University, Beijing, China

Based on the theoretical framework of coping flexibility, the present study

examined the coping flexibility of university students in response to severe acute
respiratory syndrome (SARS)-related and daily life stressful events. The Coping
Flexibility Questionnaire was used to investigate 93 university students’ coping
responses toward 10 SARS-related stressful events and 10 daily life stressful
events that generally occur among university students. Results showed that the
patterns of coping flexibility were different for the two types of stressful events.
The flexible and the active-inflexible patterns were most commonly found in
coping with daily life stressful events. By contrast, the passive-inconsistent
pattern was dominant when coping with daily life stressful events. Moreover,
participants showed lower discriminating ability to situation controllability, and
displayed poorer strategy-situation fit to cope with SARS-related events than with
daily life stressful events. The theoretical and practical implications of this study
are discussed.

Key words: controllability, coping, flexibility, severe acute respiratory syndrome

(SARS), strategy-situation fit, variability.

Introduction

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was the first severe and readily transmissible new
disease to emerge in the 21st century (World Health Organization, 2003). China was one of
the most severely affected areas. The first cases of SARS were known to emerge in mid-
November 2002 in Guangdong Province, China. The cumulative number of cases surpassed
5000 on 28 April, 6000 on 2 May, and 7000 on 8 May. Most cases and deaths were reported
from China. Unlike traumatic events that happen at an individual level, the SARS outbreak
constituted a crisis for nearly every member in the society. Because SARS is a novel, unknown
disease, were people’s coping abilities to SARS-related stressful events different from their
usual coping responses to daily stressful events? In what ways did the epidemic disaster
influence people’s appraisal and behaviors? This unexplained question is addressed in the
theoretical context of Cheng’s (2001) theory of coping flexibility in the present study.

Correspondence: Yiqun Gan, Department of Psychology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Email: ygan@pku.edu.cn
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and the Japanese Group Dynamics Association 2004
56 Yiqun Gan et al.

Coping flexibility

Coping is the ongoing cognitive or behavioral efforts to control internal or external demand
that exceed one’s own resources (Lazarus, 1993). As coping is proposed as the mediator
between stress and psychological outcomes, it has been well researched in past decades. In
the history of coping research, the transactional theory of coping proposed by Lazarus and
Folkman (Folkman & Lazarus, 1985; Folkman et al., 1986) is the most influential. According
to this theory, coping is made up of two processes: cognitive appraisal and coping behavior.
Coping can be further divided into problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping in
view of its function. The effectiveness of coping is proposed to rely on both coping efforts
and the context of the coping (Forsythe & Compas, 1987; Park et al., 2001). Previous research
has found that problem-focused coping is more useful in more controllable situations and
emotion-focused coping is more useful in less controllable situations. In this process, the
adaptive value of coping flexibility is implied.
Coping flexibility has aroused interest among researchers in the past two decades.
(Vitaliano et al., 1990; Cheng, 2001). A new approach to coping flexibility was proposed by
Cheng (2001). In her model, coping flexibility is composed of cognitive flexibility, coping
pattern, and coping outcome. Cognitive flexibility refers to an individual’s variability in the
pattern of perceived controllability across situations. Studies (Roussi et al., 2000; Cheng
et al., 2001; Cheng, 2003) indicated that individuals with high levels of cognitive flexibility
are able to discriminate situations with high controllability and low controllability. Individuals
with low levels of cognitive flexibility will indiscriminately assess all events as either
controllable or uncontrollable only.
Individual differences in coping flexibility are represented by different coping patterns.
Five coping patterns have been identified in Cheng’s (2001) study. Individuals who use more
problem-focused coping in stressful events perceived as controllable and who use more
emotion-focused coping in stressful events perceived as uncontrollable belong to the flexible
type. Individuals who consistently perceive stressful events as controllable and who use
more problem-focused coping belong to the active-inflexible type. By contrast, those who
consistently perceive stressful events as uncontrollable and use more emotion-focused coping
are classified as the passive-inflexible type. The fourth type includes those who recognize
some stressful events as controllable and others as uncontrollable but prefer to use problem-
focused strategies. These individuals belong to the active-inconsistent type. Those who
generally perceive the environment as uncontrollable and use randomly deployed coping
strategies are categorized as the passive-inconsistent type.
Apart from coping pattern, the adaptive aspect of coping flexibility should also be noted.
This construct contains two components. The first component is strategy-situation fit, which
is also referred to as ‘goodness of fit’ (Folkman & Lazarus, 1985). If a person experiences a
controllable situation and he or she uses a problem-focused strategy, a good strategy-situation
‘fit’ is attained. Similarly, if a person experiences an uncontrollable situation and he or she
uses an emotion-focused strategy, there is a good strategy-situation ‘fit’. On the contrary, if
the person encounters an uncontrollable situation but he or she uses a problem-focused
strategy, he or she may experience higher anxiety levels (Cheng et al., 1999, 2000) due to a
poor strategy-situation fit. Similarly, if the person meets a controllable situation but he or she
uses an emotion-focused strategy, there is also a lack of strategy-situation fit and the person
is more susceptible to depression (Cheng, 2001). The second component is goal attainment,
which refers to the person’s evaluation of the effectiveness of the coping behavior. Compared

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd with the Asian Association of Social Psychology

and the Japanese Group Dynamics Association 2004
 Flexible coping responses 57

with strategy-situation fit, perceived effectiveness is a more subjective indicator of the

effectiveness of coping behaviors.

The hypothesis of the current study

Cheng’s work (Cheng, 2001, 2003) on coping flexibility is limited to the area of an
individual’s cognitive and coping process in normal stressful conditions, but what would
happen to a person’s coping flexibility in an unusual crisis situation? The SARS epidemic
has occurred suddenly and the Chinese people were unprepared for it. In normal
circumstances, some people tend to cope more flexibly and thus are more adaptive than others
(Cheng, 2001, 2003). However, in a crisis situation, people tend to cope maladaptively. The
unknown crisis of SARS may not only affect people’s perceived controllability of the events,
but, also, as a whole, disrupts people’s discriminating mechanism, and reduces their coping
flexibility to SARS-related stressful events. It is possible that a person may tend to use an
unfit strategy (i.e. uncontrollable-problem focused; controllable-emotion focused) to cope
with this sudden epidemic.
The present study was aimed at examining whether Chinese university students displayed
different flexible coping patterns for handling SARS-related stressful events and daily life
stressful events. Specifically, to cope with SARS-related stressful events, university students
were hypothesized to display a lower discriminating mechanism and poorer strategy-situation
fit. To examine our hypothesis, 10 SARS-related stressful events and 10 stressful events
commonly experienced by university students were designed (see Appendix 1). University
students’ patterns of coping flexibility in response to these two types of stressful events were
compared.

Methods

Participants
Ninety-three university students from Peking University participated in this study. Among
them, 39 were males (41.9%), 54 were females (58.1%). Their average age was 22.14 years
(SD = 2.66). Participants were from 13 departments, such as psychology, physics, and
telecommunication. Most participants were from undergraduate Year 1 and Year 4 as well as
graduate Year 1 and Year 2.

Measures

Coping flexibility. The Coping Flexibility Questionnaire (CFQ) was constructed by Cheng
(2001). For each stressful event, participants were first asked to report the frequency of the
event, and then use a six-point scale to assess to what extent the participant perceived the
event as: (i) desirable; (ii) having a large impact; and (iii) controllable with regard to event
outcome. The scale ranged from 1 to 6, with a higher score indicating a greater extent of a
particular perceived dimension. Then, the participants were required to describe their actual
coping responses in that situation in a sentence, and the participants were asked their primary
goal in using the strategy - whether it was for directly handling the demands/problems
associated with the event in order to improve its effects (problem-focused coping), or for

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd with the Asian Association of Social Psychology

and the Japanese Group Dynamics Association 2004
58 Yiqun Gan et al.

reducing or managing the distress or uncomfortable feelings associated with the event
(emotion-focused coping). Finally, participants were required to subjectively assess the
effectiveness of their coping behaviors with a six-point scale, which ranged from 1 (extremely
ineffective) to 6 (extremely effective).
The CFQ was translated into Chinese by a bilingual undergraduate student. Back-
translation was done by two independent graduate students.

Daily life stressful events. The original items were derived from the University Life Event
Scale (Wang & Gan, 1994), Inventory of College Students Recent Life Experiences (Kohn
et al., 1990), and Social Readjustment Rating Scale (Reale, 1987). Items that did not apply
to university students’ life were omitted. Eventually, 68 items were generated for the initial
test.
Seven university students were selected according to the principle of convenient sampling.
The participants were required to report: (i) the frequency of the events happening to them
during the past 2 months (April and May, 2003) (0 represented never happened; 1 represented
happened once; 2 represented happened occasionally; 3 represented often happened); and
(ii) the impact of the events to them (six-point scale from - 2 to + 2, positive/negative sign
indicating the impact being positive or negative). After the initial test, 18 items remained.
The selection criterion were: (i) three or more participants reported it had happened (14
items); or (ii) two participants reported it had happened and its impact was ± 2 (four items).
These participants did not overlap with those in the main study.
In the 18 items, those that were easily confounded with a crisis event (e.g. illness or
injury of a family member) were deleted. The final version contained 10 daily events (see
Appendix 1).

SARS-related stressful event scale. We interviewed three university students, asking them to
describe fragments of situations related to the SARS outbreak that they felt were threatening.
To all the events and situations they described, three graduate students rated their impact and
controllability. Ten events that were consistently rated by the three raters as having a high
impact and having relatively large variability in controllability were selected to compose the
final version of the SARS-related Stressful Event Scale. Again, these participants did not
overlap with those in the main study.

Procedure. All the participants simultaneously completed the CFQ that contained 20 stressful
situations (10 SARS-related encounters and 10 daily stressful encounters), and the Attribution
Complexity Scale (the results of the later scale were analyzed and reported in another paper).
The participants needed 20 to 40 minutes to complete all the questionnaires. Each participant
received a souvenir of about 6 yuan (0.6 dollars) as a reward.

Results

Overview
First, we will identify the coping patterns in daily life stressful situations and SARS-related
stressful situations for examining individual differences in patterns of coping flexibility. Then,
the other two aspects of coping flexibility (i.e. cognitive flexibility, strategy-situation fit and
goal attainment) will be compared between SARS-related situations and daily life stress.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd with the Asian Association of Social Psychology
and the Japanese Group Dynamics Association 2004
 Flexible coping responses 59

Patterns of coping flexibility in daily stressful encounters

The transaction theory of coping (Folkman et al., 1986) classifies coping into four possible
categories according to the different combination of appraisals of controllability and coping
strategy as follows. Uncontrollable: problem-focused coping; uncontrollable: emotion-
focused coping; controllable: problem-focused coping; and controllable: emotion-focused
coping. K-means cluster analysis was conducted with the ratio of using each of the four
categories above described out of the total number of events experienced in daily life stress.
K-means cluster analysis uses Euclidian distance. Initial cluster centers are chosen in a first
pass of the data, and then each additional iteration group observations are derived based on
the nearest Euclidian distance to the mean of the cluster. The process continues until the
cluster means do not shift for more than a given cut-off value or the iteration limit is reached.
K-means is an iterative procedure that assigns cases to a specified number of non-overlapping
clusters. The procedure iterates through the data until it successfully clusters all cases. A five-
cluster solution was deemed the most meaningful among all the solutions. The class centers
of each category are shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Class centers generated by cluster analysis in daily stressful events

Class

1 2 3 4 5

Uncontrollable - problem-focused 0.04 0.04 0.71 0.02 0.11

Uncontrollable - emotion-focused 0.62 0.07 0.06 0.00 0.09
Controllable - problem-focused 0.21 0.77 0.15 0.25 0.11
Controllable - emotion-focused 0.10 0.09 0.08 0.71 0.07

The results found that participants in the first cluster (12 cases, 12.9%) used emotion-
focused coping when they perceived situations to be uncontrollable, and used problem-
focused coping when they perceived situations to be controllable. They belonged to the
flexible type. Participants in the second cluster (26 cases, 28.0%) generally perceived
situations as controllable and used problem-focused coping. They belonged to the active-
inflexible type. Participants in the third cluster (16 cases, 17.2%) perceived some situations
as uncontrollable but some as controllable, and they used problem-focused coping. They
could be classified as the active-inconsistent type. Participants in the fourth cluster (14 cases,
15.1%) perceived situations as controllable and used mostly emotion-focused coping. They
belonged to the passive-inflexible type. Participants in the fifth cluster (19 cases, 20%) evenly
used the four categories of coping strategies and they belonged to the mixed type.

Individual differences in coping flexibility in daily life

stressful situations
MANOVA was conducted to examine the effect of group (i.e. pattern of coping flexibility) on
perceived controllability, variability in perceived controllability, and goodness of fit. The
results revealed a significant group effect, F12,192 = 9.15, p < 0.0001.
To further examine the group effect, pairwise comparisons based on estimated marginal
means (Bonferroni adjustment for P-values) were performed. In terms of perceived
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd with the Asian Association of Social Psychology
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60 Yiqun Gan et al.

controllability, the passive-inflexible group and the active-inflexible group were at the highest
level, ps < 0.01, followed by the mixed group, ps < 0.01. With respect to the variability in
perceived controllability, the flexible group was higher than the mixed group, p < 0.01; and
was marginally higher than the active-inflexible group, p = 0.097. With respect to the
goodness of fit, the flexible group was the highest, ps < 0.01, followed by the active-inflexible
group, ps < 0.01.

Patterns of coping flexibility in SARS-related stressful encounters

K-means cluster analysis was also conducted to the ratio of using each category in SARS-
related stressful events. The class centers of each category are shown in Table 2. The three-
cluster solution was most interpretable. Participants in the first cluster (52 cases, 55.9%)
perceived most situations as uncontrollable, and used both problem-focused and emotion-
focused coping. They belonged to the passive-inconsistent type. Participants in the second
cluster (35 cases, 37.6%) perceived most situations as controllable, and used much emotion-
focused coping. This group was labeled as ‘active-unmatched’. Participants in the third cluster
(six cases, 6.5%) perceived situations to be uncontrollable, and used emotion-focused coping.
They belonged to the passive-inflexible type.

Table 2 Class centers generated by cluster analysis in

SARS-related encounters

Class

1 2 3

Uncontrollable - problem-focused 0.35 0.00 0.08

Uncontrollable - emotion-focused 0.21 0.09 0.80
Controllable - problem-focused 0.05 0.10 0.05
Controllable - emotion-focused 0.03 0.65 0.06

Individual differences in coping flexibility in SARS-related events

For SARS-related stressful events, MANOVA was conducted to examine the effect of group
(i.e. pattern of coping flexibility) on perceived controllability, variability in perceived
controllability, and goodness of fit as dependent variables. The results revealed a significant
group effect, F6,176 = 29.32, p < 0.0001.
To further examine the group effect, pairwise comparisons based on estimated marginal
means (Bonferroni adjustment for P-values) were again performed. In terms of perceived
controllability, the controllable: emotion-focused group was at the highest level, ps < 0.001.
With respect to variability in perceived controllability, there were no differences among the
three groups, ps > 0.05. With respect to the goodness of fit, the passive-inflexible group was
the highest, ps < 0.001.

Comparison of cognitive flexibility between SARS-related stress and

daily life stress
The variability in perceived controllability in 10 SARS-related encounters and 10 daily life
stressful events were computed, respectively. The mean variability in the 10 SARS-related
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd with the Asian Association of Social Psychology
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 Flexible coping responses 61

stressful events was 0.78, with a standard deviation of 0.62. In contrast, the mean variability
in the 10 daily life stressful events was 1.03, with a standard deviation of 0.61. Paired-sample
t-test indicated significant differences in variability indices between the two types of stressful
situations. When people evaluated SARS-related stress, the variability in perceived
controllability was significantly lower than when they evaluated daily stress, t = 2.32,
p = 0.023.
The differences in perceived controllability between SARS-related stress and daily life
stress should also be noted. The mean rating of the 10 SARS-related stressful events was 1.83
(SD = 0.94). The mean rating of the 10 daily life stressful events was 3.83 (SD = 0.71). Paired
sample t-test also indicated significant difference between the two types of stressful situations,
t = 12.04, p < 0.0001.

Comparison of goodness-of-fit and perceived effectiveness between

SARS-related stress and daily life stress
The number of good ‘fit’ SARS-related stress and daily life stress was computed. An event
was given a value of ‘1’ when the following two conditions were met: (i) the perceived
controllability of the event was high, and the individual used problem-focused coping; and
(ii) the perceived controllability was low, and the individual usd emotion-focused coping. An
event was assigned a value of ‘0’ when the following two conditions were met: (i) the
perceived controllability of the event was high, and the individual used emotion-focused
coping; and (ii) the perceived controllability was low, and the individual used problem-
focused coping. Because participants experienced different numbers of stressful events, the
number of fit or unfit alone could not represent the goodness-of-fit index accurately.
Therefore, ratios of strategy-situation fit among experienced events were calculated. The cases
with experienced frequencies of ‘0’ or ‘1’ were deleted. Eighty-seven cases were left for
further analyses.
The ratio of unfit for SARS-related stress and daily life stress was examined by paired
sample t-test. The mean for the ratio of unfit in SARS-related stress was 0.49 (SD = 0.36).
By contrast, the mean for the ratio of unfit in SARS-related stress was 0.39 (SD = 0.35). The
unfit ratio was significantly higher in SARS-related stress, compared with that in daily life
stress, t = 2.31, p = 0.023.
In spite of the significant difference found in the goodness-of-fit between SARS-related
stress and daily life stress, no significant difference was found in the perceived
effectiveness of their coping behavior between SARS-related stress and daily life stress,
t = 1.69, p > 0.05.

Comparison of problem-focused and emotion-focused coping between

SARS-related stress and daily life stress
The frequencies of problem-focused and emotion-focused coping were calculated for SARS-
related stressful encounters and in daily stressful encounters, respectively. Paired sample t-
test revealed that there were no significant differences in the use of problem-focused coping
between SARS-related stressful encounters and daily stressful encounters, t = - 0.837,
p > 0.05. However, significant differences were found in the use of emotion-focused coping
between the two types of stressful encounters. Specifically, the participants used more
emotion-focused coping in dealing with daily SARS-related stress than with daily stress,
t = - 9.022, p < 0.0001.
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62 Yiqun Gan et al.

Discussion

Comparison of coping flexibility patterns between SARS-related stress

and daily life stress
Although the study by Lee-Baggley et al. (this issue) revealed that individuals’ general
coping style could predict their specific coping responses during the SARS outbreak, the
present results revealed that participants’ flexible coping pattern in daily stress was different
from their coping pattern during the SARS outbreak. Specifically, when coping with daily
life stress, the present results revealed that some individuals adopted flexible strategies,
which refer to a good fit between strategy deployment and situational demands. However,
when coping with SARS-related stressful events, flexible coping with a good strategy-
situation fit was not found. One possibility of the difference in the results is that the study
by Lee-Baggley et al. examined global coping styles whereas the present study examined
cross-situational variability in coping patterns. The present study provides tentative evidence
that Chinese university students tend to deploy less flexible coping strategies for handling a
diversity of SARS-related stressful events than for handling a diversity of daily life stressful
events.
For the handling of daily life stressful events, active-inflexible coping is the dominant
strategy. Situations are generally perceived as controllable, and problem-focused coping is
generally used by Chinese university students. By contrast, for the handling of SARS-related
stressful events, more than half of the participants tended to perceive the events as
uncontrollable, and inconsistently used both problem-focused coping and emotion-focused
coping to cope with the events. Such results revealed considerable differences in appraisal
and strategy deployment when handling stress of a distinct nature. In coping with the SARS
outbreak, people may tend to appraise the crisis as uncontrollable, but randomly use problem-
focused coping and emotion-focused coping to cope with this unknown epidemic.

Comparison of cognitive flexibility between SARS-related stress and

daily life stress
The variability index of cognitive process is an important indicator of one’s ability to
distinguish situations (Cheng, 2001, 2003). A crisis contains a series of stressful events with
different extents of controllability. A well-functioned individual should be able to discriminate
the controllability of these situations accurately, and thus use corresponding coping
strategies - problem-focused coping or emotion-focused coping - to deal with the stressors.
Therefore, the variability index of the individual should be relatively larger. As shown in our
findings, the variability in perceived controllability in SARS-related stress is significantly
lower compared with that in daily life stress. Also, the perceived controllability in SARS-
related stress is significantly lower than that in daily life stress. This cognitive pattern can be
characterized by consistency in perceived uncontrollability across situations. Cheng (2001)
has proposed this cognitive flexibility pattern as a possible pattern of coping flexibility
(inflexibility) and that people who are depressed are likely to adopt this cognitive pattern. In
this light, the present study suggests that in the SARS outbreak, the coping reactions of most
people may resemble those of individuals with depression.

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 Flexible coping responses 63

Comparison of goodness-of-fit and subjective evaluation between

SARS-related stress and daily life stress
As mentioned above, people perceived SARS-related events to be more uncontrollable.
During the outbreak, people tended to use more emotion-focused coping. Although this
pattern met the requirement of the goodness-of-fit hypothesis, there was a high ratio of unfit
strategy-situation matches, which, in theory, would undermine the effectiveness of one’s
coping efforts (Aldwin, 1994). This seemingly contradictory result can be explained as
follows. First, people who are flexible in coping seemed to become less flexible during the
SARS outbreak. Second, most of the participants (94%) adopted either the passive-
inconsistent or the passive-inflexible pattern to handle the SARS-related events, and their
coping reactions displayed a strategy-situation mismatch. These results suggested that
during crisis, there was a disruption of the two strategy-situation fit conditions; that is,
the ‘controllable - problem-focused’ and ‘uncontrollable - emotion-focused’ conditions. The
present study may reveal one of the other important psychopathological characteristics of
people’s coping under crisis. Referring to the results of cluster analyses, one may note that
using emotion-focused coping in a controllable situation is common among people in crisis.
Both paired-sample mean comparison and further analyses in coping flexibility pattern
suggest that people overuse emotion-focused coping, but ignore the use of problem-solving
under crisis situations. Previous study has noted that emotion-focused coping was negatively
correlated with psychological adjustment (Zakowski et al., 2001). Even in crisis when
emotional expression was generally regarded as beneficial, the use of emotion-focused coping
was unexpectedly correlated with psychological distress and depression (Pakenham, 2001).
In fact, under crisis where fear and uncertainty dominate, people may endorse the mismatched
coping strategies, mostly using emotion-focused coping under situations that are perceived
to be controllable while occasionally using problem-focused coping under situations that are
perceived to be uncontrollable. Therefore, these findings imply that better matches between
strategies and situation should be promoted, especially the use of problem-focused coping
under controllable situations in crisis. This may be an issue worth noting by mental-health
workers.
Although there were no differences in people’s appraisal of their actual coping behavior
between SARS-related and daily life stressful events, analyses on coping flexibility suggest
that people’s discrimination mechanism to perceive controllability of a situation and the
strategy-situation fit do differ significantly. This evidence demonstrates that crisis might
disrupt an individual’s cognitive and behavioral responses to situation and thus the strategy-
situation fit.

Summary: Characteristics of coping in SARS-related events

In summary, coping in SARS-related events exhibited some unique characteristics in the
patterns of coping flexibility, and these new patterns may enhance our understanding of crisis
and coping. In the face of sudden, unpredictable SARS-related events, people tended to
experience a sense of uncontrollability, and this sense was prevalent in many stressful
events related with the crisis. To mitigate this sense of uncontrollability, people endorsed
significantly more emotion-focused coping strategies. However, this type of coping was, to
a large extent, unfit for the situations. That is, people tended to use emotion-focused coping
under situations that were perceived to be controllable, and sometimes problem-focused
coping under situations that were perceived to be uncontrollable. There were three patterns
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd with the Asian Association of Social Psychology
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64 Yiqun Gan et al.

of coping flexibility that emerged in the SARS-related events. People of the passive-
inconsistent type perceived situations to be uncontrollable and randomly endorsed problem-
focused and emotion-focused coping strategies. People of the active-unmatched type
perceived situations to be controllable and used emotion-focused coping strategies. People of
the passive-inflexible type perceived situations to be uncontrollable and used emotion-focused
coping strategies.

Implications and conclusions

Results from the present study extended Cheng’s (2001, 2003) framework of coping flexibility
to a crisis context. Although there might be little impact in global assessment of the
effectiveness of coping behaviors, the results did show that in a crisis situation, the reduced
cognitive discriminating facility and lack of strategy-situation fit are important
psychopathological characteristics in coping. Future study could be conducted by comparing
clinical samples and a non-clinical sample.
Caution should be noted that the participants in the present study were confined to
university students from Beijing. The study by Ji et al. (this issue) revealed that the perceptual
style and coping responses of participants from Beijing differed from those of participants
from Toronto, Canada. The generalizability of the present findings should be further explored
in cross-cultural studies.
The practical implication of the present study should also be noted. In future crisis
intervention programs, discrimination of situation controllability and strategy-situation fit,
especially the teaching of using problem-focused coping in controllable situations, may be
useful components.
In conclusion, based on the theoretical framework of coping flexibility (Cheng, 2001,
2003), the present study examined university students’ coping in SARS-related events and
daily life stress. The present results showed that although there was no difference in people’s
subjective evaluation of the effectiveness of their coping behaviors in SARS-related situations
and daily stressful events, people had significantly lower discriminating ability to situation
controllability and significantly poorer strategy-situation fit during the SARS outbreak.

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© Blackwell Publishing Ltd with the Asian Association of Social Psychology

and the Japanese Group Dynamics Association 2004
66 Yiqun Gan et al.

Appendix
Daily Life Event Scale
1 Conflicts with other people over hassles
2 Reputation was marred
3 Difficulties encountered in study
4 Looked down upon or laughed at by other people
5 Insomnia
6 Decisions about immediate future
7 Being misunderstood
8 Quarrel or breakup with girlfriend/boyfriend
9 Tense relationship or conflicts with fellow students
10 Dissatisfaction with present state of learning
SARS-related Stressful Event Scale
1 During SARS crisis, you or your family coughed or got a fever
4 To prevent SARS spread, being required to stay inside the campus
5 During SARS crisis, most restaurants and entertainment places were shut down
6 About 100 new SARS cases reported per day in Beijing (21 April-8 May)
7 To prevent SARS spread, all courses temporarily suspended
8 On campus, over 50% students wearing gauze masks
9 During SARS crisis, in your dorm or neighboring dorms were found students with high fever
10 SARS cases or suspects reported on your campus or among acquaintances

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd with the Asian Association of Social Psychology

and the Japanese Group Dynamics Association 2004