---
title: "Psychometric evaluation of the CISS-SF: validity, reliability, and factor structure"
id: "plos-one-14-psychometric-properties-of-a-short-form-for-the-coping-inventory-for-stressful"
canonical_url: "https://medichelpline.com/clinical-feed/plos-one-14-psychometric-properties-of-a-short-form-for-the-coping-inventory-for-stressful"
content_type: "clinical_feed_article"
specialty: "General"
source_name: "PLOS ONE (Medicine)"
source_url: "https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0356279"
published_at: "2026-08-17T14:00:00.000Z"
evidence_level: "Journal Feed"
license: "CC-BY-NC-4.0 / Informational Use"
---
# Psychometric evaluation of the CISS-SF: validity, reliability, and factor structure
## Provenance & Clinical Metadata
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- **Specialty:** [General](https://medichelpline.com/clinical-feed/general.md)
- **Primary Source:** PLOS ONE (Medicine)
- **Source URL:** [Original Journal Publication](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0356279)
- **Published At:** 2026-08-17T14:00:00.000Z
- **Evidence Rating:** Journal Feed
## Executive GIST (TL;DR)
- The Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations Short Form (**CISS-SF**) is a 21-item brief measure intended to assess three dispositional coping styles: **task-oriented**, **emotion-oriented**, and **avoidance-oriented** coping. - The present study evaluated the **factor structure**, internal reliability, temporal stability, measurement invariance, and preliminary validity of the CISS-SF in a large longitudinal community sample who completed the measure on three occasions roughly one year apart. - Confirmatory factor analysis supported a **three-factor** model composed of 21 items with acceptable fit to the sample data; the model was invariant across **gender** and **age** groups. - Internal reliabilities for the three scales were acceptable across multiple administrations and across gender and age subgroups. - One- and two-year test–retest correlations were described as **moderate**, aligning with expectations for stable coping-style constructs. - Preliminary validity analyses examined relationships between CISS-SF scales, **Big Five** personality traits, and symptoms of **depression and anxiety**, finding patterns consistent with prior coping research. - The authors conclude the CISS-SF is a valid and reliable brief multidimensional measure of coping styles suitable for research contexts where reduced assessment burden is needed. - The article is open access (PLOS ONE), data are publicly available through Greo Evidence Insights, and the authors reported no specific funding or competing interests. Note: some methodological details (e.g., exact sample size and specific fit indices) were not reported in the provided source excerpt.
## Clinical Analysis & Structured Key Points
Psychometric properties of a short form for the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS-SF) | PLOS One Browse Subject Areas ? Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field. For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click here . Article Authors Metrics Comments Media Coverage Reader Comments Figures Figures Abstract The Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS) is a widely used measure of coping that was developed to assess three basic coping styles: task-oriented, emotion-oriented, and avoidance-oriented coping. The present study examined the factor structure and psychometric properties (internal reliabilities and temporal stability) of a short form for the CISS (CISS-SF) in a large longitudinal sample of community-based adults who completed the coping measure on 3 separate occasions approximately 1 year apart. The 3-factor model composed of 21 coping items provided acceptable fit to the sample data. The model was invariant across gender and age groups. Internal reliabilities for the scales were acceptable across multiple administrations (by gender and age groups), while 1 and 2-year test-retest correlations were also moderate and consistent with what would be expected for stable coping style constructs. Preliminary validity of the CISS-SF was explored with respect to self-report measures of big five personality and depression and anxiety symptoms. The relationships between coping, big five personality, and mental-health outcomes were found to be consistent with previous research on coping. Overall, the results suggest that the CISS-SF is a valid and reliable brief multi-dimensional measure of coping styles. Citation: Van Elswyk A, Henning CT, Summerfeldt LJ, Parker JDA (2026) Psychometric properties of a short form for the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS-SF). PLoS One 21(8): e0356279. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0356279 Editor: Herb Covington, SUNY Empire, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Received: February 10, 2026; Accepted: July 31, 2026; Published: August 17, 2026 Copyright: © 2026 Van Elswyk et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: The data is publicly available at Greo Evidence Insights and can be accessed at https://www.greo.ca/en/greo-resource/data-repository.aspx . Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Compared to work on related constructs like “stress” or “defense,” the coping area is a relatively recent development in the history of psychology [ 1 ]. For example, the category for “coping” was not included in Psychological Abstracts until 1967 [ 2 ]. Despite having been introduced late in the discipline, coping has since proven to be an extremely popular construct. A recurring observation in reviews on the topic, even as the new field was just emerging [ 3 ], was the dramatic expansion of research interest on coping [ 4 – 7 ]. Taking stock of the current literature, the coping area would appear to have reached a new milestone with respect to research activity. Using the number of research sources as an indicator, the database in the ISI Web of Knowledge [ 8 ] contains 40,931 items with key-terms for “coping” in the period from 1990 to 2025. While there has been steady interest in coping research over the last 35 years, one-third (33%) of this literature has been published within the last five years alone. Given this volume of research, it is not surprising that hundreds of distinct coping assessment tools have been developed since the 1970s [ 9 – 12 ]. Though the sheer variety of measures poses a challenge for organizing research findings, much of the coping literature is concentrated around a relatively small number of assessment tools [ 13 ]. In turn, this smaller set of coping measures can be sorted into two broad approaches: “intraindividual” versus “interindividual” [ 1 , 4 , 14 ]. The intraindividual approach to coping, exemplified by measures like the Ways of Coping Questionnaire (WCQ [ 15 ]), attempts to identify basic strategies used by individuals in specific types of stressful situations. The interindividual approach, on the other hand, attempts to identify basic coping styles, or habitual coping strategies, used by individuals across different types of stressful situations. The Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS [ 16 ]), for example, is a widely used interindividual coping measure [ 13 ]. There are also coping measures, like the COPE [ 17 ], the most widely used coping measure in the literature [ 13 ], developed to have both intraindividual (situation specific) and interindividual (dispositional) forms. Although it has long been recognized that individuals have access to a broad range of potential coping strategies and reactions in any given situation [ 3 ], coping researchers have generally assumed that these responses can be organized into a relatively small number of basic coping dimensions or strategies. Importantly, these broader dimensions appear to overlap across both interindividual and intraindividual assessment approaches [ 1 ]. The number of basic coping dimensions that appear on the most widely use coping measures range from the 2 higher-order coping dimensions initially proposed by Folkman and Lazarus [ 18 ] to the 15 facets of coping measured by the COPE [ 17 ]. Of these numerous strategies and dimensions, however, three core coping dimensions have emerged to be of particular importance in the literature—namely, task-oriented, emotion-oriented, and avoidance-oriented coping [ 19 , 20 ]. Task-oriented (or problem-oriented) coping involves strategies used to appraise a stressful situation to make it more comprehensible, find solutions to address the source of the stress, or reduce the salience of the stressor on the individual [ 21 , 22 ]. Task-oriented coping is associated with better judgement and decreased anxiety [ 23 , 24 ]. In contrast, emotion-oriented coping involves focusing on the emotional consequences of a stressor rather than the stressor itself, including self-preoccupation and fantasizing reactions [ 4 , 24 ]. Avoidance-oriented coping detaches individuals further by having them seek to avoid stressful situations, including habitually denying or distracting oneself from the stressor [ 4 , 22 , 24 ]. Measuring task, emotion and avoidance-oriented coping Although there are other coping measures that tap comparable constructs, the CISS was explicitly designed as a self-report measure of broad task, emotion, and avoidance-oriented coping constructs [ 4 , 16 , 23 ]. The initial phase of creating the CISS involved compiling a comprehensive list of items representing diverse coping responses [ 16 ]. A preliminary 70-item inventory was administered to 559 undergraduate participants who were asked to gauge their general reactions when faced with challenging, stressful, or upsetting situations. The 70 items underwent several waves of factor analysis to reveal three factors (Task, Emotion, and Avoidance-Oriented coping), with factor analyses conducted separately for men and women yielding almost identical factor structures [ 16 ]. Due to discrepancies in the number of items loading on the three subscales, additional items were developed with the aim of achieving subscales with equal item counts. A subsequent 66-item scale was administered by Endler and Parker [ 16 ] to two different adult samples. Following similar analyses with the original item-pool, a 48-item scale was derived by eliminating redundant or poorly loading items, subsequently known as the CISS [ 16 ]. The final 3-factor model for the CISS, three 16-item scales assessing task-, emotion-, and avoidance-oriented coping, was validated using multiple independent samples [ 16 , 23 ]. Short form for the CISS In the research literature there has been a growing trend of abbreviated versions of commonly used assessment tools [ 25 ]. This practice is aimed at streamlining the assessment process by enabling efficient evaluation of multiple constructs while reducing the cognitive burden on research participants. Not surprisingly, short forms have been developed for several widely used coping measures [ 26 – 28 ]. In the case of the CISS, a “short form” has been in circulation since 2006 [ 29 ], however, this specific form was not originally developed by the authors of the CISS. When the 2 nd edition of the CISS manual was developed in the late 1990s [ 30 ], the authors identified 21 CISS items (three 7-item scales for task, emotion, and avoidance-oriented coping) that could be used to assess coping behaviours in specific stressful situations (e.g., coping with job loss or coping with marital separation, etc.). The development of a brief CISS-situation specific coping form (CISS-SSC) alongside the original CISS duplicated the approach to having both intraindividual and interindividual forms used by other coping scales like the COPE [ 17 ]. Cohan et al. [ 29 ] used the CISS-SSC items to operationalize a short version of the original CISS (i.e., a short interindividual coping measure of general coping styles) and examined the psychometric properties of this new form with data from undergraduates and community-based adults. Although the authors found evidence to support the use of this short form for measuring responses to “routine stressors,” they instead chose to evaluate a 4-factor model never used by Endler and Parker in the development of the CISS [ 4 , 16 , 23 , 30 ]. The long form of the CISS included two subscales within the Avoidance scale: distraction and social diversion. Building on this structure, Cohan et al. [ 29 ] proposed a 4-factor coping model consisting of 7 items for task-oriented coping, 7 items for emotion-oriented coping, 3 items for distraction coping, and 3 items for social diversion coping, while also dropping one of the original avoidance items from the CISS-SSC. Since its publication, a confusing body of literature has appeared using the CISS item set, and short form scoring developed by Cohan et al. [ 29 ], with the psychometric properties of this brief interindividual coping measure being very inconsistent across studies [ 31 – 35 ]. A contributing factor is that much of this research has utilized non-English versions of the item pool without adequate documentation on how these translated item sets were developed, increasing the likelihood of producing scales with problematic psychometric properties (see [ 36 ] for a more detailed review of this problem). Additionally, the decision by Cohan et al. [ 29 ] to derive 4 subscales from a 20-item pool likely undermined the psychometric properties of the new CISS form from the start, given the inherent challenges associated with 3-item scales (e.g., low reliability, inadequate construct representation [ 37 – 39 ]). Present study To date, no study has revisited Cohan et al.‘s [ 29 ] work and systematically evaluated the use of the 21 items from the CISS-SSC as an interindividual measure of general coping styles, particularly in line with the original 3-factor conceptual model of coping (Task, Emotion, and Avoidance-oriented coping) as proposed in the development of the original CISS and consistent with broader theoretical models of coping [ 4 , 16 , 23 ]. Using data from a large sample of adults who completed a short form of the CISS (called the CISS-SF in the remainder of this document) multiple times over several years [ 40 ], the present study sought to examine whether the original 3-factor model used in the development of the CISS [ 4 , 16 , 23 ] could be replicated in a large community-based sample. The longitudinal nature of the dataset also allowed for an exploration of test-retest reliability across a multi-year period. Using several personality and mental health variables in the dataset, the present study further examined the construct validity of the CISS-SF using variables comparable to Cohan et al. [ 29 ]—anxiety, depression, and basic personality. Method Participants and procedures The present study used data from 1372 adults (602 men and 770 women) who participated in the Leisure, Lifestyle, and Lifecycle Project (LLLP [ 40 ]). The data is publicly available at Greo Evidence Insights and can be accessed at https://www.greo.ca/en/greo-resource/data-repository.aspx . Ethical approval for data collection for the LLLP was originally obtained from the University of Alberta Health Research Ethics Board, the University of Calgary Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board, and the University of Lethbridge Human Subjects Research Committee [ 41 ]. Subsequently, ethical approval for secondary analysis of the LLLP data in the present study was obtained from the research ethics board at the authors’ home institution (file no. 25742). All participants provided informed consent for data collected for this study. Initial recruitment for the LLLP at wave one involved telephone sampling, followed by in-person interviews and the administration of various self-report questionnaires. Participants were recruited from four locations in Alberta, Canada (Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge area, and Grand Prairie area) and were also oversampled based on age and gender specific cut-offs for gambling activities, as well as for specific age groups (17- to 20-year-olds; 23- to 25-year-olds; 43- to 45-year-olds and 63- to 65-year-olds). There were four additional waves (each ~1 year apart) where data collection was completed using online surveys, and a small portion (less than 10% of the sample) completed paper and pencil versions. A total of 1,372 adults 18 years or older participated in wave one of data collection. The CISS-SF was included in waves 2, 3 and 4; data was available for 1145 individuals (478 men and 667 women) at wave 2, 1002 individuals (406 men and 596 women) at wave 3, and 1026 individuals (414 men and 612 women) at wave 4 (gender was missing for a small number of cases). At wave one, participants were on average 37.47 years old (SD = 17.26; range: 18–65). Approximately 89.87% of participants identified as White/Caucasian, 2.41% as Asian, and the remaining 7.72% as belonging to various other ethnic groups. Other demographic features of the sample have been described in detail elsewhere [ 40 , 41 ]. Ethical approval for use of the data in the present study was obtained from the research ethics board at the authors’ home institution (file no. 25742). All participants provided informed consent for data collected for this study. Measures Coping. As already noted, the CISS was originally developed as an interindividual coping measure of basic coping styles [ 4 , 16 , 23 ]. However, Endler and Parker [ 30 ] subsequently created a 21-item scale from the CISS item pool that could be used to measure situation-specific coping (CISS-SSC). The present study used the same 21 items from the CISS-SSC, but with instructions to respondents from the original CISS designed to measure basic coping styles. Unlike the measure developed by Cohan et al. [ 29 ], the CISS-SF has 21 items that measure 3 basic coping style dimensions: 7-items for task-oriented coping; 7 items for emotion-oriented coping; and 7-items for avoidance-oriented coping. Mental health. The Personality Assessment Inventory [ 42 ] is a 344-item self-report measure designed to measure various personality and psychopathology traits. The PAI uses a four-point Likert scale format (1 = “false, not at all true” to 4 = “very true”), with 8–24 items across 22 clinical subscales (e.g., anxiety, schizophrenia). The PAI has previously demonstrated good reliability and validity [ 42 ].The present study used only the anxiety and depression subscales from the PAI collected at wave 4. Basic personality. The NEO-FFI is a shortened version of the NEO-PI-R [ 43 ] designed to assess the five-factor model of personality (i.e., openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). There is extensive support for the validity and reliability of the NEO-FFI [ 43 ]. The present study used data on the NEO-FFI collected at wave 1 (the only wave in which the personality measure was used). Statistical procedure Factor structure. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was used to assess the proposed 3-factor structure of the 21 CISS-SF items, separately for waves 2, 3, and 4. All CFA models were estimated using Diagonally Weighted Least Squares (DWLS) as the estimation method. To assess goodness of fit, we used the following robust indices: Comparative Fit Index (CFI), Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) with its 90% confidence interval (CI), and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR). The following graded fit criteria were used based on previously recommended cut-offs to evaluate the quality of each model [ 44 , 45 ]: CFI ≥ 0.95, RMSEA ≤ 0.05, and SRMR ≤ 0.08 for good fit; CFI ≥ 0.90, RMSEA ≤ 0.08, and SRMR ≤ 0.10 for acceptable fit. Measurement invariance. Measurement invariance of the 3-factor structure for the CISS-SF was evaluated with respect to gender (males and females) and age (age groups for 18–25 and 42–65) using data from wave 2, as well as with respect to time (wave 2, wave 3, and wave 4). We tested for measurement invariance for gender, age and time separately, within a multiple-group CFA framework by fitting the same model for each sample (e.g., males and females) simultaneously and imposing increasingly restrictive cross-group equality constraints on its parameters. We began with a baseline model constraining only the number of factors and the pattern of factor loadings (configural invariance), then conducted a test of invariant factor loadings (metric invariance), and then a test of invariant factor covariances (structural invariance). Invariance was assumed to hold if these constrained models fit the data well and if there was minimal difference in their fit from that of the baseline model [ 46 ]. Because of excessive Type I error rates associated with the chi-square difference test in large samples, we adapted a procedure recommended by Vandenberg and Lance [ 47 ] and evaluated the relative fit of constrained models using change in CFI, RMSEA and SRMR values, with minor differences of ≤.02 indicating equivalent fit. Incremental validity. To examine the relationships between coping, the five-factor model of personality, and mental health symptomatology, Pearson product-moment correlations were calculated (separately by gender) between the CISS-SF scales at wave 2, scales for the five-factor model at wave 1, and the scales for depression and anxiety at wave 4. For all Pearson product-moment correlations, missing cases were excluded in a pairwise fashion across the waves of available data. To evaluate incremental validity of the CISS-SF with respect to predicting depression and anxiety symptomatology, two hierarchical multiple regressions were conducted (separately by gender). For each regression model, mental health symptom scale scores were used as the dependent variable and the 5 scales from the NEO-FFI at wave 1 were entered as the predictor variables in step 1, followed by the three CISS-SF scales at wave 2 entered as predictor variables in step 2. Separate regression models were conducted with either depression or anxiety as the dependent variable. Results Factor structure CFA was used to assess the 3-factor theoretical model for the CISS-SF items separately for each wave of data. The 3-factor model for the CISS-SF items showed acceptable model fit for all three waves: Wave 2, CFI = .924, SRMR = .076, and RMSEA = .075, 90% CI = [.071,.078]; Wave 3, CFI = .915, SRMR = .085, and RMSEA = .084, 90% CI = [.080,.088]; and Wave 4, CFI = .919, SRMR = .083, and RMSEA = .081, 90% CI = [.0
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