What this test does. It presents 28 situations, each with four things a person might do. Every situation offers exactly one response from each of four coping families, so your choice tells us which family you reach for when they compete. The result is a profile, not a score — there are no correct answers and nothing to maximise.
The four families.
How to answer. Choose what you would actually do first, not what you believe would work best. Forced choice makes that easier than a rating scale does, because all four options are things reasonable people do — but it cannot remove the pull toward the flattering answer entirely. That part is up to you.
What the numbers mean, and what they do not. The four family counts always add to 28, because each choice awards one family at the expense of the other three. So a high problem-focused count means you chose those responses more often than the alternatives presented — not that you use problem-focused coping a lot in absolute terms, and not that your emotion-regulating coping is low. Scores of this kind are relative to each other and cannot be compared with published norms from any instrument.
On the strategy detail. Within a family, the four strategies never appear as options in the same situation, so their ordering is inferred from how each performed against the other families rather than measured head to head. Read it as a general ordering, not as evidence that one was chosen over another.
Provenance. The 16 strategies are informed by the coping literature, including the dimensions measured by the Brief COPE, which Charles Carver makes freely available. The four families and all situations here are written for Cognitive Train, so this is not the Brief COPE and results are not comparable to it. This is an educational self-assessment, not a clinical assessment or a diagnosis.
The full list of strategies with examples is on the Coping Mechanisms guide. For the automatic patterns operating underneath deliberate coping, see the Defense Mechanism Recognition Test.