CHANGES IN COPING DURING ADOLESCENCE - POSSIBLE CONCEPTUALIZATIONS

Developmental research on coping assumes the observation not only of quantitative changes in the use of individual strategies or occurrence of various types of responses, but also the changes in the structure of coping. The present study focuses on the structure of coping and its changes during adolescence from a transactional approach; this is with a view to the interdependent relationship between stress and coping and to the mutual connections between the various responses to stress, given their parallel or sequential occurrence. The shifts that occur during adolescence are viewed in part from an analysis factor derived from a range of problems and responses, and in part through the help of structural models of the problems and the responses to them within two age groups. The data comes from 403 thirteen-year-old and 248 fifteen-year-old adolescents, longitudinally observed within the framework of the Czech part of the ELSPAC study.