engleski

The Pattern Approach to Coping Research: Re-examining the Personality-Coping Relationship

The two main goals of this work relate to the classification of pupils according to the different coping patterns they use when confronted with an academic stressor, and to the description of these groups of pupils with respect to their cognitive appraisals of academic stress, their personality traits, and their coping outcomes. Older elementary school pupils (6th to 8th grade) participated in this investigation. Data regarding the pupils’ sex, age and grade point average were collected in addition to coping scale, and measures of extroversion, neuroticism, test anxiety, self-esteem and cognitive appraisals of stressors. K-means cluster analysis was used to classify pupils into six groups according to their pattern of coping with academic stress. Two of the groups consist of pupils who have very high or very low score on all coping strategies. The remaining pupils were classified into following four groups: a) pupils focused exclusively on solving the problem, b) those focused on solving the problem and on using social support, c) those focused on minimizing the problem, and d) those who are emotionally reactive in stressful situations. Results also show that these students differ from each other with respect to their cognitive appraisals of academic stress, their personality, their perception of efficacy and their academic success. Advantages of the pattern analysis approach in explaining contradictory findings from previous correlational research are emphasized.

Coping; School Stress; Personality

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