Person-Environment Congruence and Coping Strategies

This study explored the differences in coping strategies and styles between students who made congruent, incongruent, and undecided college major choices. The coping strategies were operationally defined by the Ways of Coping Questionnaire (WCQ; Folkman & Lazarus, 1988) and the Coping Inventory (CI; Zeitlin, 1985). Congruent, incongruent, and undecided college major choice groups were defined operationally using the Self-Directed Search (SDS; Holland, 1985b) and the College Majors Finder (CMF; Rosen, Holmberg, & Holland, 1989). The Holland codes that resulted from the SDS and the CMF defined the congruent and incongruent students using the Iachan congruence index. The multivariate analysis of variance revealed significant findings for the main effect of gender on the WCQ. On the CI, the multivariate analysis of variance again revealed a main effect for gender. In general, the findings of this study suggest that male and female students report some different coping strategies and styles. Follow-up tests further suggest a few group differences among the congruent, incongruent, and undecided students.