Coping with distress among adolescents: Effectiveness of personal narratives on support websites

 Sofie Mariën, University of Antwerp (Belgium)

 Heidi Vandebosch, University of Antwerp (Belgium)

 Sara Pabian, Tilburg University (Netherlands)

 Karolien Poels, University of Antwerp (Belgium)

https://doi.org/10.3916/C67-2021-07

Keywords

Adolescence, coping strategies, narrative, quantitative analysis, social support, virtual environments

Abstract

Sharing, reading and responding to personal narratives on peer-to-peer support websites may provide adolescents with informational and emotional support to feel more confident in coping with stressful events. However, their use may also pose a threat to adolescents’ coping self-efficacy. Principles of expressive writing, social sharing of emotions, narrative persuasion and self-effects may provide insight in how these actions may both positively and negatively relate to coping self-efficacy. By using a cross-sectional online survey with 311 Dutch-speaking adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18, this article explores how these actions and social support motives (i.e. information-seeking and emotional support-seeking) are related to adolescents’ perceptions about the usefulness of these websites to their coping self-efficacy. The results showed a positive relation between adolescents’ social support motives and their belief in the usefulness of these websites to their coping self-efficacy. Therefore, we conclude that it may be an effective coping strategy for many adolescents. There was a negative relation between experience with sharing a personal narrative and coping self-efficacy, meaning that these users did not perceive the website to be helpful to their overall confidence in coping with stressful events. However, this negative relation was reversed when they were motivated to find emotional support with similar others.

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Fundref

This research was funded by the Research Council of the University of Antwerp (The use of online personal narratives to improve adolescents’ coping with psychological distress, BOF-DOCPRO 2018, 36938).

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Technical information

Received: 16-09-2020

Revised: 04-11-2020

Accepted: 16-11-2020

OnlineFirst: 15-01-2021

Publication date: 01-04-2021

Article revision time: 49 days | Average time revision issue 67: 36 days

Article acceptance time: 61 days | Average time of acceptance issue 67: 67 days

Preprint editing time: 152 days | Average editing time preprint issue 67: 159 days

Article editing time: 197 days | Average editing time issue 67: 204 days

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