Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ArticlesTeenagers' Attitudes About Coping Strategies and Help-Seeking Behavior for Suicidality
Section snippets
Subjects
Adolescents aged 13 through 19 years, enrolled in the ninth through 12th grades in six high schools in Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties in New York, were the targeted population for this study. These schools were selected as controls for a āpostventionā study examining the impact of a student's suicide (Gould, unpublished). A control school was within a school district noncontiguous to a case school (i.e., where a student had committed suicide), was within the same or adjacent county
RESULTS
The factor analysis yielded an interpretable three-factor model, which accounted for 30.3% (14.7, 8.3, and 7.3) of the total variance (see Table 1). The reliability estimates (Cronbach Ī± coefficient) were .54, .60, and .40 for the three factors, respectively. The first two factors included coping strategies reflecting either maladaptive or adaptive attitudes, labeled maladaptive coping strategies (MCS) and help-seeking strategies (HSS), respectively. The third factor, labeled suicide
DISCUSSION
Two factors that approximate attitudes consistent with avoidance and approach coping strategies, respectively (Beutler et al., 2003), were identified. The MCS factor reflected dysfunctional attitudes that would appear to support isolative behaviors, and the HSS factor consisted of items endorsing healthy coping strategies that involved actively seeking advice and appropriate services from others for a suicidal person. Similar to other studies, most adolescents generally endorsed healthy
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Supported by NIMH grants R01MH52827, K20MH01298, and T32MH16434. The authors gratefully acknowledge Dr. Rachel Kramer's assistance in the project's early phases.