Coping under a COVID-19 lockdown: patterns of daily coping and individual differences in coping repertoires

ABSTRACT

Background

Polyregulation—the concurrent or sequential use of multiple strategies to regulate affect or cope with stressors—is a frequent but understudied phenomenon.

Objectives

We aimed to identify patterns of daily coping and individuals’ coping repertoires (i.e., range of coping patterns employed across situations) during a COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. We investigated day-level covariates (appraisals, worrying, mood) of daily coping patterns and person-level covariates (psychopathology, average mood) of coping repertoires. Design: A non-representative community sample (n = 322, 15–82 years old) participated in a 21-day ambulatory assessment study.

Methods

We applied multilevel latent class analysis..

Results

We identified seven daily coping patterns and ten classes of individuals differing in the size of their coping repertoire and their propensity for polyregulation. Daily coping patterns differed in daily perceived controllability and mood (but not in daily worrying or stress). At the person level, individuals with a higher level of average coronavirus-related worrying more frequently engaged in a high degree of polyregulation. The size of individuals’ coping repertoire was unrelated to psychopathology and average mood.

Conclusion

The findings provide insights into the composition of daily coping patterns and individuals’ coping repertoires during crisis periods and contribute to a new polyregulation perspective on coping.

KEYWORDS:

• Daily coping
• polyregulation
• coping repertoire
• COVID-19 related stressors
• ambulatory assessment
• multilevel latent class analysis

Data availability:

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, T.L., upon request.

Preregistration:

The study design and analysis plan were preregistered on the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/62acb

Supplemental online material:

Additional supporting information is provided in a supplemental material document.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 These participants did not differ in initial online survey variables from the participants who completed the AA part of the study.

2 The cutoff response time was determined by conducting a pilot AA study (that contained the same items), in which research assistants were asked to provide valid answers as quickly as possible. In this pilot study, the minimum response time was 1.17 s/item on average for the morning survey and 1.56 s/item on average for the evening survey. (We attributed the shorter response time for the morning survey to the fact that items in the evening survey were longer on average than items in the morning survey). In the main study, assessments with average response times per item below these cutoff scores were excluded from the analysis.

3 For single-item measures, it is not possible to calculate reliability estimates such as two-level alpha or two-level omega (Geldhof et al., 2014) at the within- and the between-person level (alpha would require two items, and omega would require three items per strategy). At the between-person level, however, an alternative strategy to estimate between-person reliability of coping strategy use is to calculate an odd-even correlation between two aggregates (mean across odd days, mean across even days) for each coping strategy. For the eight coping strategy items, the odd-even correlations were high (Min = .83, Max = .89, M = .86).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Initiative of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany (Forschungsinitiative Rheinland-Pfalz).