3-088 - Using Daily Diary Methods to Assess Coping Responses to Stress Among Children, Adolescents, and Parents in Diverse Contexts

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Individuals use an array of coping responses and emotion regulation strategies to manage stressful demands in their daily lives and promote successful adjustment. These regulatory abilities develop across the lifespan as children, adolescents, and adults mature cognitively, socially, and emotionally. Ecological momentary assessments (e.g., daily diary reports) allow developmental researchers to examine stress-coping processes repeatedly over time, more effectively measure naturally-occurring daily stressors and emotions, and capture the diversity and efficacy of varying coping responses to daily challenges. The papers in this symposium represent this daily process approach by examining within-person associations among daily stress, emotional experiences, and coping responses across diverse contexts and different developmental periods. These four unique studies utilized daily diary reports collected from racially/ethnically and socioeconomically diverse samples, including children and their parents from a large metropolitan area, inner-city Latino adolescents, and adolescents transitioning to college. The various contexts provide a rich opportunity to discuss considerations of developmental timing when using daily diaries to capture coping processes. Importantly, measures across these studies incorporate both subjective and objective assessments of emotions and regulation in participants’ naturalistic settings, including child- and parent-reported mood, cortisol reactivity, and diurnal cortisol activity. Together, the papers will make substantive contributions to our understanding of daily coping processes and methodological contributions to the discussion of effectively integrating daily diaries into studies across development. Based on research in naturalistic settings, findings from these papers can readily inform prevention programs and policy decisions aimed at improving responses to stress for children, adolescents, and parents.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chairs

• Michael R Sladek, Arizona State University

• Leah D Doane Sampey, Arizona State University

Individual Presentations

• Everyday Positive Family Interactions Attenuate Emotional Reactivity to Academic and Peer Problems - Presenting Author: Sunhye Bai, University of California, Los Angeles; Rena Repetti, UCLA; Theodore F. Robles, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles

• Synchrony in Parent-Child Diurnal Cortisol Over Eight Days - Presenting Author: Delana Marie Parker, UCLA; Rena Repetti, UCLA; Theodore F. Robles, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles

• Stress, Coping, and Mood among Low-Income Latino Adolescents: A Daily Diary Study - Presenting Author: Catherine DeCarlo Santiago, Loyola University, Chicago; Stephanie A. Torres, Loyola University Chicago

• Naturalistic Assessment of Daily Emotions, Coping Responses, and Cortisol Reactivity Among Adolescents in the College Context - Presenting Author: Michael R Sladek, Arizona State University; Leah D Doane Sampey, Arizona State University