Making Meaning of Adversity: Coping and Self-Authorship in Undergraduate Students.

Coping;Self-authorship;College Students;Stress;Education;Social Sciences;Higher Education

Wakefield, Kerri MicheleLawrence, Janet H. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Coping;    Self-authorship;    College Students;    Stress;    Education;    Social Sciences;    Higher Education;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/99951/kerriw_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Stress is one of the most frequently reported health concerns for college students, and learning how to cope with stress is critical to students’ success during and after college.The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the construct of stress-related coping in college students, specifically what types of stressful experiences and coping strategies students reported and how their coping changed across contexts, over time, and by self-authorship level.The analytic sample was comprised of 55 undergraduate students at six institutions who were interviewed annually as part of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education; the sophomore and junior year interviews were used in this study.The data were analyzed using grounded theory methods, and a new conceptualization of the coping process emerged.A total of 164 stressful experiences and 728 coping strategies were reported in the 110 transcripts.I identified three categories of stressful experience contexts (intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional) and four categories of coping strategy types (problem-focused, emotion-focused, meaning-focused, maladaptive).Across contexts, students were more likely to opt for problem-focused strategies when they perceived greater control and for meaning-focused strategies when they perceived less control over the situation.Students who reported stressful experiences within the same context in Years 2 and 3 were more likely to choose maladaptive strategies in Year 2 and adaptive strategies in Year 3.There were variations in the type of strategies students chose as well as the complexity of individual strategies across self-authorship levels; as self-authorship increased, students’ strategies evolved from being characterized by deferring to authorities’ opinions and avoiding responsibility for coping to filtering others’ advice through their own perspectives, accepting responsibility for coping, and learning from their stressful experiences.This study revealed new insights about the cognitive processes underlying coping for undergraduate students, including the relationships among self-authorship level, cognitive appraisals, perceptions, and coping strategies.Future studies of coping would benefit from taking self-authorship into account and exploring the impact of coping strategies on situational and global outcomes.Implications for practice include engaging students in reflective conversations about their stressful experiences to promote self-authorship development and more adaptive coping responses.