An Exploration of the Relationship between Young People’s Coping Skills and their Psychological Wellbeing

The broad focus of this thesis is to explore the relationship that coping behaviours have with psychological wellbeing in children and young people (aged 11 to 18).

The Review Paper explores whether coping based interventions can improve the coping skills and psychological wellbeing of young people.

This review found some evidence for coping interventions being able to decrease the use of maladaptive coping in young people.

There was no consistent evidence found for interventions being able to increase young people's use of adaptive coping.

Some evidence was found for coping interventions improving attributes of depression and low self-efficacy.

The Empirical Paper investigates the coping behaviours of participants aged 11 to 12.

Participants' coping behaviours were measured by their self-generated coping responses to an interview vignette which described hypothetical problem situations which switched from being in participants' control, to not being in their control to change.

This study is interested in the fit of coping behaviours to the controllability of the situations, as most coping responses are not adaptive in all situations.

A cross-sectional relational design was used to measure the relationship between participants' psychological attributes (obtained from total difficulties and externalising behaviour scores on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, Goodman, 2001) and coping behaviours.

This study found the most evidence for psychological attributes (both total difficulties and externalising behaviours) having a relationship with the number of secondary control coping responses (responses aimed at emotionally adjusting to a situation) that were generated in response to uncontrollable situations.

Higher presenting psychological difficulties were associated with fewer secondary control coping responses.

There was some evidence for psychological attributes having a relationship with the sizes of coping repertoires (number of unique coping strategies that participants could generate).

Higher presenting psychological difficulties were associated with having smaller coping repertoires.