This study deals with the development of techniques to measure the area of childhood personality development known as coping ability. Coping ability can be seen in children's ways of handling unfamiliar and stressful situations and is a skill that is seen as likely very influential in an individual's total development, both social-emotional and cognitive development. The report describes the situations and procedures that were developed to elicit coping behaviors. Further, methods of observing, recording, and categorizing coping were also presented. The objectives of this pilots study were to determine whether a useful set of contrived or staged techniques could be developed that would elicit many of the coping behaviors a child might reveal in his natural environment. The preliminary results showed that the younger children aged 3 and 4 years showed different coping styles than the 5, 6, and 7 year olds and that a hierarchy of more to less mature forms of coping could possibly be developed in future studies. Some recommendations for further work in this area were suggested. (Author)