engleski

Coping with stress during military basic training

Within the stress and coping theoretical framework the study examines how conscripts experience, appraise and deal with various aspects of life during the beginning phase of their military service. A set of self-report instruments measuring potential sources of problems during military service, cognitive appraisals, and the ways of coping with stressors, was administered on the sample of 449 males within first 7-12 days of their service, and taken again in the same sample of recruits five weeks later, i.e., in the last but one week of their military basic training. Specific sources of problems cited by participants as more or less stressful showed to be relatively similar in two measurement points, although the rank of item average values varied to some extent from the very beginning to the final weeks of basic training. The results point to moderately high level of stress intensity and generally low level of perceived controllability of selected categories of situations reported by conscripts. The study showed that active adjusting and pasivization were the most frequently used modes of coping, followed by reinterpretation, humor and seeking social support, whereas the least frequently used strategies were expression of emotions and negotiation. Small, but significant changes were observed as in cognitive appraisals so in the ways of coping with selected stressful situations encountered by recruits during basic training.

military recruits; basic training; stress; cognitive appraisals; coping

nije evidentirano