RCOPE (Full Religious Coping)

The RCOPE, developed by Kenneth Pargament, Harold Koenig, and Lisa Perez in 2000, is the comprehensive instrument for measuring how people draw on religion to cope with stress, loss, and crisis. Where earlier measures asked only whether religion helped, the RCOPE maps the many specific methods of religious coping onto a set of subscales — from benevolent religious reappraisal, collaborative problem-solving with God, and seeking spiritual support to punishing-God reappraisal, spiritual discontent, and reappraisal of God's powers. These subscales sort into a positive religious coping pattern, reflecting a secure relationship with the sacred, and a negative pattern, reflecting spiritual struggle, and the two relate to adjustment in opposite directions. The full RCOPE is the parent instrument behind the widely used Brief RCOPE.