DAILY STRESSORS, COPING STRATEGIES AND ADJUSTMENT OF ADOLESCENTS

Abstract

This study was initiated to identify the daily stressors, coping strategies and adjustment of adolescents. It was a two phased study. In Phase I, a pilot study was conducted on thirty two adolescents who were between 14 to 18 years of age, to establish the applicability of the instruments to be used for the final study and also to have a preliminary sense of the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the research. In Phase II, two studies were conducted. In Study A, Situational COPE (Carver & Scheier, 1982), was used to identify daily stressors and coping strategies. Perceived Self Efficacy Scale (Jerusalem & Schwarzer, 1979) was used as an indicator of adjustment. 435 (249 females, 186 males) school/college students participated in this study. Their age ranged between 14 and 19 years (M= 16.84). Content analysis of reported stressors revealed four major stressful domains: Academics, Interpersonal, Intra personal and Socio-environmental. Religious Coping, Planning, Positive Reinterpretation and Growth, Focus on and Venting of Emotions emerged as the most dominant coping strategies. The less opted strategies were Substance Use and Humor. Problem-Focused coping dominated over Emotion-Focused or Dysfunctional coping types. Frequency of stressors demonstrates that females were more stressed in the domains of academics and interpersonal relations and males were more stressed in socio-environmental domain. Intrapersonal stressors were reported equally by both genders. Likewise, intrapersonal stressors were less in early adolescents and high in mid adolescents; interpersonal stressors were reported equally by all age groups. Similarly, academic stressors were more pronounced in early adolescents and less in older adolescents; socio-environmental stressors, however, increased with age. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted, to see the main effects of gender on different COPE scales. Significant gender differences were found on four sub-scales: Religious Coping [F(1,434)= 3.86, p< .05], Humor [F(1,434)= 6.45, p= .05], Behavior Disengagement [F(1,434)= 5.95, p< .05], and Substance Use [F(1,434)= 4.49, p< .05]. Females scored high on Religious Coping and Behavioral Disengagement and males scored high on Humor and Substance Use. ANOVA was also computed to see age effects and significant differences were found on three COPE sub-scales. On Focus on and Venting of Emotions, adolescents in their mid years vented off their emotions more [F(2,434)= 3.35, p< .05], Denial [F(2,434)=3.45, p< .05] was more among older adolescents and Acceptance [F(2,434)= 4.34, p< .05] increased with age. The perceived Self-efficacy among adolescents was also high and it was positively correlated with Problem-focused coping. In Study B, thirty participants (15 males, 15 females), 17 to 19 years of age were studied repeatedly for six weeks. Initially Dispositional COPE (Carver & Scheier, 1982) was given to them to see their usual coping pattern. Then, diary method was used to identify their daily stressors and Situational COPE was used to assess coping. A qualitative analysis was carried out, individual patterns emerged and each pattern did not match largely with the reported dispositional style coping of those individuals, hence preference for certain coping strategies did emerge. Gender comparison was also done and both males and females exhibited coping with stressful situations in a variety of ways. Active coping, Planning, Acceptance, Religious Coping, Mental or Behavioral Disengagement, Focus on and Venting of Emotions were the most dominant coping strategies for stressors related to academics, interpersonal, intrapersonal and socio-environmental domains.