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UBC Theses and Dissertations

Perception of social support in adolescence : the impact of a stress-management intervention Seigo, Nancy L.

Abstract

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.

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