The present paper reports on the results of the Spanish adaptation and preliminary validation of the Coping Style Questionnaire (CSQ – Roger, Jarvis & Najarian,1993), conducted with a sample of Venezuelan university students. The original 60 items scale measures four dimensions of coping styles: Rational, Emotional, Avoidance and Detached coping; however, Roger (1995) proposed a shorter version of 41 items, where the emotional and detached coping merged in one bipolar dimension with both factors on either side of the scale. This abbreviated scale, together with other personality questionnaires, was administered to a sample of 292 university students from three different universities in Caracas. Results replicated the original four factor structure for this coping questionnaire, with acceptable internal consistency. The concurrent validity study supports the theoretical structure for each dimension. This Spanish version of the CSQ can be taken as a reliable scale for the measurement of coping styles in different contexts.