Despite the large amount of research on coping over the past 2 decades, few studies of coping strategies have included samples of battered women. Much of the research that does exist in populations of abused women has been qualitative or descriptive in nature. In addition, researchers have tended to overlook contextual issues when evaluating the adaptive/maladaptive nature of victims’ coping strategies. Thus, abused women’s strategies for survival have sometimes been compared to the coping strategies used by community samples in response to ordinary life stressors with the eventual conclusion that battered women are lacking in problem-solving. The researchers argue in this paper that a battering relationship creates a special set of circumstances under which a women decides how to react and that those circumstances cannot be ignored in understanding her ways of coping with the violence. This review attempts to address the complexities of the relationships between context, stress, and coping among battered women by examining the contextual predictors of coping strategies, including such factors as abuse severity and frequency, available resources, and skills deficits. Due to the lack of theory in partner abuse literature, this review applied theories and models from the more general coping literature to organize the existing research on coping in battered women. In addition to the review of contextual factors, this paper examines the psychological outcomes most commonly associated with domestic violence: depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and self-esteem. Methodological issues, such as research methods, measurement issues, and sampling, are discussed throughout the paper, and recommendations are made for future research. References