COPING WITH DIFFERENT CONCERNS - CONSISTENCY AND VARIATION IN COPING STRATEGIES USED BY ADOLESCENTS

This study set out to determine the relationship between those things which are of concern to adolescents, and the ways in which young people cope with these concerns. One hundred and seventy-eight senior students from five postprimary schools in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia, completed a checklist designed to measure coping. They did this three times, once for each of three identified domains of concern, namely Achievement and Relationship concerns and Social Issues. The analysis of their coping patterns indicates that regardless of the problem, students have a stable hierarchy of preferred coping strategies which are in the repertoire of most, if not all, students. Nevertheless, significant differences were found in the way students cope with different concerns, the most general finding being that Social Issues concerns were managed in a different way to Achievement and Relationship issues. These findings support a conceptualisation of coping which includes a general style of coping which is not problem specific as well as a component which is specific to a problem.