Coping and attributional styles as predictors of depression

Abstract

This study examined how coping styles relate to attributional styles and how the two interact in relation to depression. One hundred seventy-six subjects completed the Ways of Coping Checklist, the Attributional Style Questionnaire, and the Beck Depression Inventory. Problem-focused coping correlated with stable and global attributions for positive events for men. Emotion-focused coping correlated with internal, stable, and global attributions for negative events for women and internal and global attributions for men. Correlations between depression and attributions as predicted by the reformulated model of helplessness were significant only for women. These results indicate that research on attributional styles should analyze all data separately by gender. While the results show that both coping and attributions accounted for some of the variance in depression for females, coping contributed considerably more unique variance than attributions.