The Y2K Bug, the programming glitch expected to derail computerized systems worldwide when the year changed from 1999 to 2000, provided a rich context for examining anticipatory coping and preparatory behaviors. In the last 2 months of 1999, 697 respondents completed an online survey of proactivity, worry about Y2K, dispositional optimism, primary and secondary control-oriented coping efforts, estimates of Y2K-related disruptions, and household preparations. Higher levels of proactivity, worry, and optimism were independently associated with greater self-reported preparations. These predictors were positively associated with greater primary control-oriented coping efforts, but showed differential relations to secondary control efforts, such as accepting the situation or trusting a higher power, especially among participants who thought the damage would be severe and lasting. Implications for understanding multiple ways of coping with potential stressors are discussed.
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The Y2K bug was caused by a programming short cut in which two digits were used to represent the calendar year instead of four. Without special software upgrades, computerized systems would read the year 2000 as 1900, creating massive problems as the program's internal calendar would be rolled back 100 years.
In addition to the main English language version, the survey was offered in several other languages, but none of foreign language sites achieved sufficient participation rates for analysis. An off-line companion study was conducted by snowball sampling in small towns primarily in rural Pennsylvania (N=188). The results of the off-line survey replicated some, but not all of the results obtained in the online sample. Specifically, as was the case in the online sample, an earlier participation date (b=.27, p < .0001) and greater reports of worry (b=.41, p < .0001) were significantly related to higher damage estimates, while in contrast to the online sample, age was significantly related to lower damage estimates (b=−.20, p < .01). None of the demographic predictors was significantly related to preparations. Both worry (b=.41, p < .0001) and optimism (b = .14, p < .06) predicted greater preparations, but neither proactivity nor damage estimates was a significant predictor of preparations in the off-line sample. With regard to primary control-oriented active coping, proactivity (b=.40, p < .0001), worry (b=.21, p < .01), and damage estimates (b=.24, p < .001) were significant predictors of greater active coping, as they were in the online sample; however, optimism was not a significant predictor. In contrast to the results for the online sample, there were no significant predictors of accommodative coping and only one significant predictor of religious/reason coping (gender, such that women were more likely than men to report religious/reason coping, b=.20, p < .01). It is impossible to determine whether these differences are due to sampling issues (e.g., the offline sample was older by an average of 10 years, less educated, less ethnically diverse (97.3% Caucasian), less likely to use a personal computer, and more likely to report religious/reason-oriented coping); different recruiting and data collection methods; different participation dates with respect to Y2K (the offline study ran from October 1 to December 27, 1999, while the online survey ran from November 8 to December 17), urban vs. rural differences in residence and the corresponding likelihood of being directly affected by Y2K-related disruptions (reflected by lower damage estimates in the rural sample compared to the online sample); power differences related to sample size; unreliability of the findings reported in the main (online) sample, or some combination of these and/or other factors. An additional complication of the snowball sampling method that makes interpretation of the off-line results difficult is that questionnaires were given to multiple members of the same household, making these data dependent and reducing the likelihood that individual differences among members of the same household would predict household preparations.
The major cause of incomplete data was a glitch in the way the mood and coping items were recorded. Specifically, participants' answers to the entire set of mood or coping items were placed in the same data field, separated by commas, rather than in separate fields. Thus, if a respondent failed to answer one or more mood or coping items, it was not possible to determine which items were skipped and which were completed. Thus, the primary analyses are reported on the 697 respondents for whom unequivocal mood data were obtained, and the analyses involving the coping items were conducted on the 656 respondents for whom we could be absolutely sure which answers corresponded to which items.
As Folkman and Moskowitz noted in their 2004 review, efforts to find meaning frequently load on an active coping factor. The substantial loading for the illusory control item was likely due to the active content of doing things to increase or maintain one's good luck.
Responses indicating that someone else had taken care of the preparation or was thinking about it were minimal, ranging from 3–12% depending on the particular preparatory behavior. The most frequent occurrence of “someone else” responses (12%) was obtained for the question regarding testing one's personal computer for Y2K compliance.
In a random-digit dialing survey of 3533 American adults who completed telephone interviews in March 2000, 48% had Internet access, and of these, the majority (63% of men, 57% of women) reported going online daily. Results suggested that Internet access was comparable among men (51%) and women (46%); more common in young (66%) and middle-aged adults (ages 30–49, 58%; ages 50–64, 41%) than among adults over 65 (13%), and strongly associated with education (18% of respondents with less than a high school education reported access, compared to 74% of those with college degrees). Racial differences were also apparent, with 50% of Whites and 35% of Blacks reporting Internet access.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, for partial funding of the costs of publicizing the survey. The authors wish to thank the following people, and especially Kent Norman, Marc Kaplan, and Jean Fleckenstein Reuter, for their assistance in this project: Patty Curran, Pat Gaffke, Doug Hill, Julie Jordan, David Keppler, Barbara Keppler, JongHan Kim, the Sechrist family, students in the first author's Fall 1999 honors Health Psychology course, and all others who assisted with the foreign language versions of the survey. We also wish to thank Ralf Schwarzer for sharing his measures, Shelley E. Taylor and Suzanne Thompson for helpful comments on a previous version of this article, and Angela Newman and Atara MacNamara for their assistance in the preparation of this article. Suzanne Thompson served as Guest Editor for this article.
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Aspinwall, L.G., Sechrist, G.B. & Jones, P.R. Expect the Best and Prepare for the Worst: Anticipatory Coping and Preparations for Y2K. Motiv Emot 29, 353–384 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-006-9008-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-006-9008-y