The 3 major papers of a symposium are included. Primary emphases are on: (1) problems of conceptualizing and measuring coping behavior in 8 cultures; (2) the effect of socio-cultural premises on coping behavior; and (3) the influence of social class on coping behavior. The first report discusses the steps involved in empirically determining whether a desirable, cross-cultural problem-solving behavior exists and focuses on the conceptual formulation and some reliability and validity findings from a first-stage study. The second paper traces the refinement of coping theory from an early formulation, which grossly dichotomized coping behavior into active and passive, through the most recent formulation in which 20 factorially distinct dimensions are discriminated. The final paper points up the problems involved in comparing coping styles across social class. Findings are reported which show that social class differences are similar in the various countries under study. (TL)