Chapter 2: The Relationship Between Coping Strategies, Decision-Coping Patterns, and Self-Efficacy in Adolescence

We postulated that coping strategies for dealing with stressful problems, coping patterns for dealing with difficult decisions, and self-efficacy beliefs are closely related processes. The study involved 566 Italian high school students (298 girls, 268 boys) who were administered a scale to measure selfreported coping strategies in response to general and specific concerns and a questionnaire to measure self-reported decision-coping patterns. Correlations between coping strategies and decision-coping patterns were generally small to moderate indicating two conceptually and empirically separate but related processes. As predicted, the productive coping style was positively correlated with the vigilant decision-coping pattern. The coping strategy of reference to others was associated with vigilance among girls but not boys. Higher self-efficacy beliefs were correlated with vigilance and productive coping while lower self-efficacy beliefs were associated with procrastination, buck-passing and hypervigilance, and nonproductive coping strategies.