Search results

Purpose – To synthesize the literature on coping among adolescents of color in the U.S., we examine normative and circumstantial stressors, describe coping strategies, and summarize the literature on coping for the promotion of well-being among adolescents of color, including descriptive and intervention studies.

Methods/approach – We conducted an extensive review of the literature in four scientific databases (medline, CINAHL, ERIC, and PyschInfo) between July 2010 and June 2011 (key words: (minority) adolescent(s) (of color), cope/coping, stress (ors), and adaptation/psychological). Studies included in our review were peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and June 2011 that presented original data on the coping strategies and outcomes of adolescents of color (e.g., studies including a majority from underrepresented racial/ethnic communities) between the ages of 12 and 18.

Findings – We identified a total of 91 articles for inclusion, including 83 descriptive and 8 intervention studies. We use a matrix approach to compare descriptive studies by their purpose, study design, sample, targeted stressors, and outcomes. We then discuss the eight interventions we identified, highlighting the targeted population, intervention protocol/adaptation, feasibility/acceptability, and study outcomes.

Implications – The breadth and depth of research on coping among adolescents of color has improved significantly over the past decade, yet our review reveals several areas where further exploration is needed, including research on intra-group differences, validation of coping measures in diverse groups, measurement of the effectiveness of coping strategies over time, and most importantly, the translation of available knowledge on effective coping into culturally relevant, multifaceted interventions for adolescents and their families.

The primary aim of this chapter is to explore stigmatization, stress, and coping among adolescent mothers and to identify positive coping mechanisms that not only resist stigmatization but also generate positive affect.

Fifty-two pregnant and parenting adolescents in an urban county in the Midwestern United States were recruited to participate. A journaling tool was developed and used to allow participants to express their thoughts and concerns in a real-time, reflexive manner. Data were coded at different “nodes” or themes. Concepts, such as stigma, stress, strength, and empowerment were operationalized into key words and “themes” based on previous published literature. Key phrases were used to code the journaling data.

Adolescent mothers used positive reappraisal of life circumstances to create a positive self-image and resist the stress of stigma and parenting. Overcoming stereotypes and success in parenting were reappraised as “strength,” which allowed the young women to feel empowered in their caregiving role.

The chapter also contributes to the sociological literature on positive coping responses to stigma and stress. Indeed, very few studies have employed the sociological imagination of pregnant and parenting adolescents by describing not only their lives but also seeking their understanding and explaining their lives sociologically. This chapter also has direct implications for several health care providers, including nurses and social workers. For example, nurses and social workers are a vital part of the healthcare team for pregnant and parenting adolescents, and they often serve as the link between the adolescent, her family and significant others, and healthcare and social service agencies.

This chapter described the mechanisms that adolescent mothers use to cope with stress with a focus on how caregiving generates positive affect through the voices of these young mothers themselves. This chapter contributed to the sociological literature on stress and coping. In particular, our findings were also in line with the work of sociologist Antonovsky’s Sense of Coherence concept. SOC is a global measure that indicates the availability of, and willingness to use, adaptive coping resources as a key variable in maintaining health.

Despite growing concerns over the increasing incidence of compulsive buying among young consumers, scant research attention has been focused on this darker side of consumer behavior among adolescent consumers. The purpose of this paper is to gain a better understanding of compulsive buying as a coping mechanism in early adolescents.

The present study is the first to experimentally manipulate a common and important stressor in the lives of adolescents, academic stress, and measures its impact on compulsive buying among a sample of 12‐13 year old seventh graders. Next, the authors investigate whether gender moderates the stress‐compulsive buying relationship.

The present study finds that early adolescents increasingly turn to compulsive buying in an attempt to cope with heightened levels of academic stress. Surprisingly, gender was not found to moderate this relationship. Both boys and girls were found to respond to higher levels of academic stress with higher incidences of compulsive buying. Results suggest that compulsive buying is a common coping strategy for adolescents from both genders.

The results of this study suggest that compulsive buying is a common coping strategy in early adolescents. Additionally, both boys and girls were found to use compulsive buying as a means to cope with stress associated with school. Whether compulsive buying can be considered an adaptive or maladaptive coping strategy when dealing with stress requires further study be conducted in this area of research.

The paper makes several unique and important contributions to the literature. First, it describes one of few studies to investigate compulsive buying in early adolescents – a hard to reach population. Second, it is the only study to experimentally manipulate stress levels to investigate its impact on compulsive buying. Third, the study's findings in regard to gender's impact (or lack thereof) on the stress‐compulsive buying relationship suggest that compulsive buying begins early in adolescence and is a common coping strategy for both boys and girls. How young people cope with common stressors such as school has important implications for their mental and physical well‐being.

Adults use food, alcohol, and drugs, including cigarettes, to alter their mood states. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that adolescents follow a similar course. This paper explores adolescents’ use of cigarettes to moderate negative emotions. The authors examine questionnaire and qualitative data from a longitudinal study of over 3,500 East Sussex secondary school pupils in the context of published accounts of stress, coping and smoking. Together, these studies raise the possibility that smokers perceive more stress in their lives and use different coping strategies from non‐smokers. Results indicate that despite the popular belief that adolescent girls experience greater stress than do teenage boys, the gender differences in smoking prevalence observed in recent years cannot be attributed directly to differences either in perceived stress, or in coping strategies. Finally, beliefs about smoking and weight control are explored in the context of young adolescents’ views about their bodies. The widely held assumption that teenage girls use cigarettes to control body weight is challenged.

The purpose of this paper is to understand cybervictims’ attributions, emotional responses, and coping strategies for cyberbullying incidents that they actually experienced.

There were 76 cybervictims (51 percent girls) between the ages of 12 and 14 included in this study. Adolescents participated in one-on-one interviews to provide comprehensive information about their attributions, emotional responses, and coping strategies for their actual experiences of cyberbullying.

Findings from the study revealed that cybervictims felt insecure and paranoid after experiencing cyber victimization. Cybervictims attributed to their experience of cyberbullying to drama or a fight between themselves and the perpetrators as well as being targeted by an ex-significant other or ex-friend seeking revenge against them for relationship dissolution. They also used adaptive (e.g. social support) and maladaptive (e.g. revenge) coping strategies to deal with cyber victimization, sometimes utilizing a combination of these strategies.

The findings of this study could help with the design of intervention and prevention programs designed to reduce or prevent the negative effects of cyberbullying.

The study aims to explore the current experiences of Ukrainian adolescents affected by the Russia-Ukraine war. The study focused on the changes in adolescents’ lives caused by the war, adolescents’ emotional reactions to the disruptions caused by the war, coping strategies employed by adolescents in dealing with disruptions and the role of information technology in supporting new realities and coping strategies of adolescents.

This study relied on semi-structured interviews conducted on Zoom with 27 Ukrainian adolescents ages 10-18. Participants were recruited using the snowball sample and came from various regions of Ukraine. The interview notes and partial transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis to identify the common and unique patterns in participant responses.

The interview data revealed the signs of traumatic experiences and various stages and methods of coping with them. Participants’ resilience was supported by external factors, including families, communities, continuous schooling, ability to talk to friends, information technology, as well as internal skills, including social competence, problem-solving, critical consciousness, autonomy and a sense of purpose. Participants shared specific recommendations for improving information platforms and online content, e.g. making them more accessible and affordable for Ukrainian users, improving content curation and personalization, creating and promoting Ukrainian content and others.

Research relied on convenience sample of participants who had access to information communication technology (ICT), were aware and had an ability to participate. Field work is needed to reach out to participants without access to ICT.

This study contains broad recommendations for improving information technologies for the use of Ukrainian adolescents.

This research offers three timely account of the first-hand experiences of Ukrainian adolescents affected by the Russia-Ukraine war and can inform future work aimed at improving life conditions for teen population.

This study relied on first-hand reports of Ukrainian adolescents’ experiences, feelings and coping strategies during the first three months of Russia-Ukraine war. The study applied war trauma and resilience frameworks to interpret the findings and translate some of the findings into practical recommendations for the information science community.

Adolescence is an important life stage including physical, emotional and social changes that make adolescents vulnerable to mental health issues. To face these emotional and behavioral problems, adolescents may use various coping strategies. This exploratory qualitative study aimed to better understand the coping strategies when adolescents face mental health difficulties, the reasons why some adolescents find it difficult to seek social support and/or professional care and which interventions they would find efficient to improve adolescents' mental health.

The study included 28 participants aged between 12–19 years old. Four online focus groups (FGs) separated by gender and age were performed between March and April 2021, during the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland.

The results show that several strategies put forward by participants did not include talking about their problems with others. Reducing the stigma and taking the adolescents' mental health seriously would make it easier for adolescents to talk about their problems to other people. Overall, participants considered that doing leisure-time activities and going out with friends were the best way to reduce stressful situations and mental health problems. For all aspects of health, including the mental one, it is important that policies promote the access to sports and arts activities for all the adolescents.

This study explored adolescents' coping strategies and their opinions on intervention for dealing with potential mental health problems, an issue that is still taboo for some adolescents.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the role of empathy in adolescents coping with maternal cancer to identify passive and active empathy forms and the role of these in adolescent coping at a challenging time.

This study was a secondary content analysis carried out on 15 adolescent interviews that were analysed to find the evidence of empathy in active and passive forms. Adolescents were between 14 and 20 years of age, their mothers were diagnosed with cancer in the previous 24 months to the interview.

The analysis identified more evidence of active forms of empathy than passive directed at ill mothers and their families as helpful behaviours and emotional support. Passive empathy was experienced by adolescents who did not have major changes in their daily routines because of maternal cancer. Both passive and active empathy were perceived as coping mechanisms. Maternal illness motivated adolescents’ empathy and encouraged actions to support their mothers, immediate and extended families.

Empathy is complex but can be important for adolescent development including their social skills and relationships; however, research has not evaluated the role of empathy in adolescents experiencing maternal cancer.

The compulsive buying (CB)behaviour has become topics of increasing interest to researchers and policy makers, particularly because researches have shown that it can influence consumer behaviour and well-being. However, a clear picture of how this phenomenon arises has proven elusive. Using the adolescents perceived level of stress as an integrative framework, the purpose of this paper is to derive hypotheses from two theoretical perspectives (the stress and CB behaviour), and uses a survey of adolescents (15-18) year in India to test the hypotheses.

The present study is the first to experimentally manipulate important stressors in the lives of adolescents, i.e. familial and non-familial; and measures its impact on CB among a sample of 15-18-year old adolescents. Next, the authors investigate the relationship between CB and post-purchase regret and then whether gender moderates the stress-CB relationship.

The present study finds that adolescents increasingly turn to CB in an attempt to cope with heightened levels of stress due to familial and non-familial factors. Surprisingly, findings reveal that non-familial factors are not a major source of stress among adolescents. Gender was not found to moderate stress-CB relationship. Both boys and girls were found to respond to higher levels of stress with higher incidences of CB. Results suggest that CB behaviour is a common coping strategy for adolescents from both genders. The findings indicate that one’s experiences and circumstances in adolescence are related to their CB behaviour, thus a framework has been used to elucidate them, have important implications for theory and practice.

The study makes some inimitable and significant contributions to the literature. It portrays one of few studies to investigate CB during adolescence period – a hard to reach population. Here authors experimentally manipulate stress levels to investigate its impact on CB. The study’s findings in regard to gender’s impact on the stress-CB relationship suggest that CB begins during adolescence period and is a common coping strategy for both boys and girls.

As an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth understanding of adolescent experiences of maternal cancer to identify the individual and contextual factors that shape adolescent experiences and evaluates the potential applicability of the Family Ecology Model to the illness context.

This analysis is focussed on three female adolescents who completed semi-structured interviews, which were subjected to IPA. Maternal illness is a challenge for adolescents, which can be improved or undermined by their contexts. The analysis yielded three sub-themes: family structure, social supports, experiencing maternal cancer at a time of transition and the lasting impact of cancer.

This study found that adolescent experiences of maternal cancer depend on their contexts from an ecological perspective the type and quality of adolescent interactions determine coping and adjustment. Maternal cancer can be difficult as adolescents are already facing specific developmental challenges. Future research can benefit from adopting an ecological perspective to further understand adolescent experiences to support adolescent that may be more vulnerable and benefit from additional supports. This is not a generalisable piece of research but it provides a very deep and detailed understanding of the impact of maternal cancer on adolescents’ developmental course and determines how the complexity of their contexts can serve as a risk or a protective factor at this challenging time.

This paper contributes to the body of research by providing a comprehensive understanding of adolescents facing maternal cancer. The Ecological Model supports the findings of this research and proves to be a good model to understand the complex interplay between adolescents and their environments when facing a difficult challenge like maternal cancer is.