ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the evidence and discusses future-oriented coping, including the mixed evidence for relationships between coping and personality constructs. It presents some original empirical research which explores the stability over time of the most widely used future-oriented coping measure. The chapter assesses the associations over time between future-oriented coping and some key personality constructs. It also presents original longitudinal empirical research to provide evidence for the dispositional nature of the proactive coping inventory (PCI), as well as to investigate the mediating relationships between future-oriented coping, personality, and psychological strain. The results revealed that the test-retest coefficients for the PCI were consistent with those expected of trait measures, and that proactive coping was superior to preventive coping in acting as a mediator between various personality traits and psychological strain over time. S. J. Sohl and A. Moyer suggested that the relationships between preventive coping and outcomes may be due to its shared variance with proactive coping.
