Den tillgängliga forskningen visar att förekomsten av stress och stressrelaterad ohälsa ökar bland högskolestudenter och påverkar deras studieprestation negativt. Syftet med denna studie var att öka förståelse för studierelaterad stress genom att lyssna på och analysera studenters subjektiva upplevelser och tankar kring studierelaterad stress samt hur de beskriver att de påverkas av och hanterar denna stress. En kvalitativ forskningsmetod valdes i form av semistrukturerad intervju för att besvara frågeställningar. Åtta studenters intervjuer transkriberades och analyserades därefter med tematisk analys.  Resultaten visade på att stress både kunde ses som positiv och negativ. Studenterna beskrev både fysiska, sociala och emotionella konsekvenser. Studien visade på att studenterna hade ett ansvar för att hantera sin stress och möjligheter att förhålla sig och utveckla sin studieteknik men att de också uttryckte en önskan om stöd från högskola. Studien hoppas väcka större intresse för ämnet och utvecklandet av möjligheter för studenter att kunna reducera stress.

Coping plays an important role in human adaptation and well-being. However, surprisingly little is currently known about the normative development of coping. The ‘coping families’ framework, outlined by Skinner and colleagues (2003), provides a promising approach to the study of coping in developmental samples. The current examination tested the coping families approach in emerging adults. A total of 425 individuals (63.5% female), aged 18-31 years (M age 25.04 years), were recruited online through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to complete questionnaires on demographic information, personality, childhood adversity, stress, coping behaviors in response to an interpersonal problem, mental health, emerging adult identity, substance use behaviors, and competence. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) examined the structure of coping behaviors. Bivariate correlations were used to examine associations between age and coping behaviors, and regression analyses examined associations between coping behaviors and various adaptive and maladaptive outcomes. EFA results yielded partial support for the coping families approach. Correlations between age and coping were not significant, suggesting that there were no meaningful age shifts in coping in the present sample. Lastly, regression analyses suggested that coping behaviors significantly predicted some adaptive and maladaptive outcomes, after statistically accounting for potential confounding variables, such as personality and childhood adversity. Findings are integrated within existing research and implications for applied work are discussed.

A Narrative Analysis of Resilience and Coping in Persons Diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis by Mildred C. Alford Ph.D., Ed., Berne International Graduate University, 1998 M.S. Ed., Texas A & M University, Commerce, 1989 B.S., Psychology, University of Houston, 1976 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Health Psychology Walden University June 2017

Huntington disease (HD) is a degenerative neurological disease that typically onsets in midlife. It leads to progressively severe impairment in cognitive, behavioral, and motor function and premature death. Persons who test positive for the HD gene expansion know they will develop the disease. Research indicates changes are detectable several years before onset. Thus, HD has a long prodromal period (prHD). While researchers are aware of changes, little is known whether persons with prHD or their companions notice changes, or how they make sense of and cope with them. Leventhal and colleagues developed the Common Sense Model of Illness Representation (CSM) to describe how people make sense of illness. According to the CSM, people notice somatic changes, form illness representations, select coping procedures and evaluate them, and reappraise illness representations in an iterative process. The CSM has been used to explore illness representations in a variety of illnesses, including diagnosed HD. The authors of the model state it is also applicable in anticipated illness but this assertion has not been adequately tested. The purpose of this thesis was to use the CSM to explore and describe illness representations in persons with prHD and their companions. The results of this exploration are presented in three papers. The first paper, presented in Chapter 2, was a preliminary study based on interview data from 8 persons and 7 companions. Results of this analysis indicated persons with prHD and companions noticed and made attributions for changes, suggesting they formed illness representations. However, they were unsure whether some changes were related to HD. Results were considered preliminary because participants were not directly asked to make attributions. Data were also limited to changes in work function and the sample size was small. In the next two papers, 23 couples were interviewed. The purpose of the second paper, presented in Chapter 3, was to explore illness representations in persons with prHD and their companions and evaluate the usefulness of the CSM in anticipated illness using prHD as a model. Results supported preliminary findings: Participants noticed changes, made attributions, used coping strategies and evaluated them. Again, they unsure whether some changes were related to HD. Other elements of the CSM were partially supported by the data. The third paper, presented in Chapter 4, used quantitative and qualitative methods to explore coping in persons with prHD and companions. Participants were asked open-ended questions about how they coped with changes and were also verbally administered the Brief COPE scale. Both quantitative and qualitative data showed participants used active coping, acceptance, planning, and social support. Participants rarely used denial or substance abuse. Persons with prHD used more coping strategies than companions. Three major themes from the qualitative interview were identified: trying to fix it, can't fix it, and not broken yet. Qualitative interviews revealed some coping strategies that the Brief COPE did not measure. Findings from these papers may inform interventions to help people with prHD and companions cope with changes. Persons with prHD and companions might benefit from knowing what changes might be related to HD in order to cope more effectively.

Magister Artium (Child and Family Studies) - MA(CFS) / Child-headed households (CHHs) are a recent development that has become progressively noticeable not only in South Africa but also internationally. This phenomenon arose as a result of the death of parents or abandonment of children by their primary caregivers. The Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) epidemic has taken away the lives particularly of many adults, leaving children orphaned and having to take on the adults’ responsibilities. In the past, relatives or the extended family would take the responsibility of caring and providing for orphaned children but, with current economic hardships, most families are unable to take the extra responsibility. As a result, older siblings become caregivers to their younger siblings. Unfortunately, when parents die, children often lose access to adequate food, social grants, education and health services. Despite the fact that it is the right of all South Africans, including children, to have access to sufficient food, many households, including CHHs, are living in poverty. As a result, they are vulnerable to food insecurity, leading to developmental, social and emotional challenges. The aim of the present study was to explore and describe the experiences, challenges and coping strategies of CHHs with food insecurity in Ingwavuma, from a bio-ecological perspective. Ingwavuma is a small rural town in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa. The study makes recommendations for social work projects, education and future research regarding CHHs’ experiences of food insecurity. This is a qualitative study that utilised an explorative-descriptive methodological approach. Purposive sampling was used to select 20 children between the ages of 13 and 18 years old from CHHs in Ingwavuma. One-on-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants at their homes in the town.

To date, few multicomponent interventions focused on meeting the complex needs of unaccompanied homeless youth (UHY) have been developed. One intervention, called Starting Right, Now (SRN), provides unaccompanied homeless adolescents with a broad range of home-, school-, and community-based services and supports to meet the unique needs of each individual. Previous qualitative research has supported the effectiveness of SRN on student outcomes; there has not yet been an examination of the program using quantitative methods. Thus, the current study investigated the impact of Starting Right, Now on students’ well-being through the examination of longitudinal data collected over a 12-month period. Specifically, changes in students’ life satisfaction, hope, and use of coping strategies at three time points were examined. A dataset including ten unique participants was analyzed using the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test to evaluate whether statistically significant changes in participants’ (1) life satisfaction, (2) hope agency, (3) hope pathways, (4) maladaptive coping strategies, and (5) adaptive coping strategies occurred between baseline (Time 1), six months of participation (Time 2), and twelve months of participation (Time 3; available for a subset of the sample). Results indicated a statistically significant increase in life satisfaction, hope agency, and hope pathways after six months of participation in SRN. There were no additional statistically significant changes in life satisfaction, hope agency, or hope pathways after one year of participation, and there were no statistically significant changes in adaptive coping or maladaptive coping at any time point. Findings from the current study support the implementation and future expansion of the SRN model in order to positively impact life satisfaction and hope among UHY.

Schotte and Clum (1982,1987) proposed a model of suicide ideation in which cognitive rigidity (in the presenc eof negative life stress) causes a reduction in problem solving capacity and subsequently leads to hopelessness, which in turn increases the risk for suicide ideation. The aim of the current study was to attempt to improve the model by the addition of a coping variable. The model was tested using a sample 05 85 undergraduate psychology students. the subjects were requested to complete a total of five questionnaires on a once only basis. A new model was developed in which a low level of problem solving confidence and a failure to express emotions combines with the presence of negative life stress to lead to a state of hopelessness, which in turn increases the risk of suicideideation. Results of the study are discussed in terms of the need for a more complex model of suicide ideation which more fully accounts for the effects of different coping strategies on the development of feelings of hopelessness. / Masters Thesis

In three separate studies, this thesis examined stress and coping in nurse practitioners during first time exposure to post-mortem care. Using a self report questionnaire and a retrospective design, Study 1 (N=97) examined the nurse's first experience administering post-mortem care to the recently deceased. The results obtained from this exploratory investigation established that many nurses reported significant distress and used emotion-focused coping strategies (avoidance and palliation) to manage the experience. These data are consistent with those reported by others who have researched in the area, and support the hypotheses that first time exposure to post-mortem care can induce significant distress in some nurses, and that the memory is vividly recalled many years after the event. The second study used a prospective design. Base line data were collected prior to the nurse performing post-mortem care (N=59), 24 hours after they participated in their first post-mortem care procedure, and 1 and 5 weeks post-event. The General Health Questionnaire-28, the Revised Ways of Coping Checklist, the Revised Collett-Lester Fear of Death and Dying Scale, and the Impact of Event Scale were used to obtain data which were compared with that of a control group (N=59) of nurses undertaking an academic examination. The results confirmed that beginning nurse practitioners resort to using predominantly emotion-focused coping strategies when faced with stressful life events. Moreover, a direct linear relationship between the participants' fear of death and dying scores and the way they rated the impact of performing post-mortem care was found. Colaizzi's (1978) method of data analysis was used in the third and final study in the series (N=6) that explored the lived experience of nurses performing post-mortem care. The essence of the first experience was embedded in six key themes that structured the lived experience. Psychic disorganisation was experienced by the participants because they were unprepared both psychologically and educationally to deal with the experience and resorted to using emotion-focused coping strategies. It is concluded that nurses' first exposure to post-mortem care procedures is stressful and they use predominately emotion focused coping strategies to deal with the experience.

The issue investigated in this thesis concerned the adaptive coping strategies that caregivers of the mentally ill adopt at different stages of encounter with their family member’s illness. Specifically, family caregivers’ responses to the illness were investigated within the parameters of the Spaniol and Zipple (1994) 4-stage model of the evolution of caregivers’ responses to mental illness. The accuracy of the model’s representation of the experience of caregivers across all kinship relationships to the care-recipient was evaluated. Spaniol and Zipple proposed four stages which they termed (1) Discovery/Denial, (2) Recognition/Acceptance, (3) Coping and (4) Personal/Political Advocacy. The first stage is characterised by persistent denial of mental illness and seeking answers from multiple sources. The second stage involves caregivers’ expectations of professionals providing answers when the illness is recognised. At this stage caregivers experience guilt, embarrassment and blame. The cyclical nature of the illness impedes acceptance and caregivers experience a deep sense of loss and crisis of meaning as they gradually accept the reality of the situation. In the third stage coping replaces grieving and the issues encountered include loss of faith in professionals, disruption to family life and recurrent crises. Belief in family expertise grows and the focus of coping changes. The fourth stage proposes that caregivers become more assertive, self-blame decreases and the focus is upon changing the system. New meanings and values are integrated. This study found that the model did not accurately describe the experience of all caregivers. Caregiver did not deny mental illness and adaptive coping occurred throughout all stages. Coping evolved as the issues encountered changed and was independent of resolution of grief. The issues encountered were more extensive than the model proposed and differed according to kinship relationship to the care recipient. The ways in which adaptive coping evolved were identified, as were the issues and their accompanying responses. Caregivers coped by adaptively responding to the requirements of care provision, maintaining a sense of self worth and generating positive effect.

<p>Over the last few decades, increased flexibility and lack of stability in employment has made job insecurity a work stressor that keeps affecting more and more  employees. This study investigates to what extent core self-evaluations influence the appraisal of job insecurity in a Swedish sample of white-collar workers (N=425). By applying the Preacher & Hayes’ macro for multiple mediation the study also tests if there is a mediating effect of coping style on the relation between core self-evaluations and job insecurity. The results show that core self-evaluations have predictive validity in relation to job insecurity. Core self-evaluations are also associated with task-based coping style. However, no mediating effect of coping style was found on the relation between core self-evaluations and job insecurity.</p> / Stockholm Stress Center / Job insecurity from a gender perspective