Prevalence of strategies for coping with daily stress in children.

BACKGROUND: The study of coping strategies in children guarantees quality of life from childhood onwards. The present paper aims to determine the prevalence of coping strategies for three everyday problems in children, while examining sociodemographic variables, context variables, and teacher assessment.

METHOD: The sample is composed of 7,058 school children aged between 8 and 13 years old.

RESULTS: Results show a higher prevalence of the Active Solution strategy at home and in school contexts compared with the health area, where the Active Solutionis the least prevalent strategy, and Concealing the Problem the most widely used, followed by Passivity. Other highly prevalent strategies in the school context include Search for Information, Emotion, and Social Support. In general, regardless of the context, Behavioural Avoidance and Passivity are theleast prevalent strategies, whereas Active Solution is the most prevalent one, followed by Emotion. The last two-Active Solution and Emotion - are part of two main coping styles suggested in a number of studies on which these results are based, which will be compared and discussed in this study.

CONCLUSIONS: The present study allows us to extract relevant epidemiological information on strategies used to cope with everyday problems related to health, family, and school, in a sample of socially well-adapted and psychologically healthy Spanish school children. The data obtained can be useful in an increasing number of situations and contexts, both for diagnostic purposes and for psycho-educational orientation and intervention.