A stress-management intervention for adolescents called the Coping Skills Program
(Madden, James, & Paton, Australia, 1994) was replicated in order to test the generalizability to
Canadian adolescents. A social support component was added to inform adolescents about the
advantages of seeking social support in times of stress and to increase their awareness of support
systems that are available. This study examined the impact of the stress intervention on
perceptions of social support from family and friends and on social support coping. The
participants (32 females and 25 males) were grade 9 students assigned to one of two treatment
groups or a control group. Two treatment conditions were compared, a skills intervention (Skills)
and a knowledge intervention (Knowledge). The intervention program consisted of five 50-minute
sessions conducted over 5 weeks. Perceived Social Support from Family (Procidano & Heller,
1983), Perceived Social Support from Friends (Procidano & Heller, 1983) and the Coping
Questionnaire for Adolescents (Madden, James, Paton, & King, 1992) were administered at pre,
post and 6 month follow-up. It was predicted that levels of perceived support from family and
friends and the relative use of social support coping would increase from pretest to posttest for
both treatment conditions compared with the control group and that the Skills group would
maintain these increases from posttest to follow-up. The results indicated that there was a
significant Group X Time interaction from pretest to posttest for both the Perceived Social Support
from Friends and Perceived Social Support from Family measures, and from posttest to follow-up
for the Perceived Social Support from Friends. When the mean scores were examined, the
direction of change was generally opposite to the hypothesized direction of change resulting in
rejection of the hypothesis. There was a moderate and significant correlation between posttest
scores of social support coping and follow-up scores of perceived social support from family.
These results indicate that greater use of social support coping predicted an increase in the
perceived support felt. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/5894 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Seigo, Nancy L. |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 4261938 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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