Life events and strategies for coping with stress in the seventh grade schoolchildren

Abstract

Stressful life events can range from everyday frustrations and conflicts to real traumas that can have profound consequences upon adolescents such as death of a close person, parents' divorce or war occurrences, etc. What particular consequences would stressful life events have for psycho-physical state of an individual depends, to a large extent, upon the strategy he uses in a concrete stress situation (Lacković-Grgin, 2000). In this research project, conducted upon a sample of 100 of the seventh grade schoolchildren, a correlation between stress, measured by the Life Events Stress Scale - STRESS - D (Košta, Vulić-Prtorić, 2002) and individual strategies for overcoming them as expressed by the Children's Coping Strategies Checklist-Revision 1 (CCSC-R1) (Ayers, et al., 1996) is explored. The most stressful life events, in children's views, are physical changes due to growing up, death of a close cousin, accusation for something they have not done, elders' distrust and shaming before others, while the coping strategies are expressed through four factors, namely: active coping, distraction, avoidance of situation and support seeking. The statistical analysis has shown that the most important correlations are between a stressful event, death of a close cousin and active coping (r=.321; p<0.01), that is support from others (r=.326; p<0.01) as well as between shaming before others and avoidance (r=.328; p<0.01), that is, support seeking (r=.317; p<0.01). The results tell us that the experience of stressful events and coping strategies possess certain characteristics that are peculiar for the schoolchild of higher elementary school grades.

Keywords

• life events
• stress coping strategies
• schoolchildren.