School-aged Sheltered Homeless Childrens Stressors and Coping St

Cedarville UniversityDigitalCommons@Cedarville Faculty Dissertations 2001 School-aged Sheltered Homeless Children's Stressors and Coping Strategies Chu-Yu Huang Cedarville University, hu

Cedarville University

DigitalCommons@Cedarville

Faculty Dissertations

2001

School-aged Sheltered Homeless Children's

Stressors and Coping Strategies

Chu-Yu Huang

Cedarville University, huangc@cedarville.edu

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Recommended Citation

Huang, Chu-Yu, "School-aged Sheltered Homeless Children's Stressors and Coping Strategies" (2001) Faculty Dissertations 51.

http://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/faculty_dissertations/51

ABSTRACT The purpose was to study the stressors, coping strategies, coping effectiveness behavioral states, and gender differences of school-aged homeless children The

conceptual framework was Lazarus' and Folkman's (1984) stress and coping paradigm and child development perspectives

A cross-sectional descriptive design was used The sample consisted of 90

children and their mothers residing in shelters The children ranged in age form 8 to 12 years, 46 were females and 44 were males, 65 were African-American, 23 were

Caucasian, and it was the first time homeless for 55 of the families Data were collected through interviews with the children using Homeless Sheltered Children Interview Schedule The mothers completed the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach, 1991) and

a background information sheet

Content analysis was used to delineate five categories of stressors and

subcategories The largest number of stressors was related to family (n=325), followed

by shelter (n=235), and school (n=231) Fewer stressors were related to the friend (n=90) and self (n=49) categories Females identified significantly more total number of

stressors compared to males

The children's coping strategies were categorized using Ryan-Wenger's (1992) coping strategy taxonomy The most frequently used were endurance, stressor

modification, social support, emotional expression, behavioral avoidance and behavioral

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distraction The least frequently used were cognitive distraction and cognitive solving Females identified significantly more total number of coping strategies and more number of coping strategies for the shelter stressors than males

problem-The majority of the coping strategies (80%) were perceived as effective problem-The coping strategies for the friend stressors have the highest percentage (85%) of being effective, followed by shelter (84%), school (81%), self (79%) and family stressors (74%) Stressor modification was the most frequently used effective coping strategies The aggressive activities and endurance were frequently used ineffective categories Females reported significantly more number of effective coping strategies than males

No significant gender differences were found for the Total, Internalizing and externalizing scores The children using information seeking coping strategies for the family stressors (CBCL scores = 70), and the children using self-controlling activities coping strategies for the self stressors (CBCL scores = 64) had clinical range CBCL scores

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