Poster #83 - Peer Group Affiliations as Contextual Resources in Academic Coping at the Beginning of Middle School

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

When students are faced with academic challenges, their predominant coping styles can be adaptive or maladaptive. Skinner, Pitzer & Steele (2013) list adaptive ways of academic coping, which are beneficial in the long run, and maladaptive responses, which can be liabilities when difficulties occur. The goal of this study was to extend this view by including contextual resources, namely, children’s peer group members. Homophily is the guiding principle of peer selection: children tend to seek out others who are similar to them themselves (Laursen, 2017). Our question was whether students who join a group are also similar in their ways of coping with academic adversity. This should be most apparent at the beginning of middle school, a time of heightened academic stress and changes in peer relationships.

In the fall, 366 sixth graders in the only public school in a town (48% female; 90% European American) completed questionnaires consisting of 44 items, measuring five adaptive and six maladaptive coping strategies (4-point Likert scales; Skinner et al., 2013, see Table 1; all strategies except rumination were highly intercorrelated (r’s from .32 to .71). Two approaches were used to operationalize use of strategies: First, students’ Self-report Scores measured their typical ways of coping. Secondly, the scores were transformed into Coping Allocation Scores, capturing the proportion with which each strategy was deployed in relation to all alternatives. The Allocation Scores are intended to reflect predominant coping styles while standardizing for the amount of stress experienced.

To identify peer affiliations, 280 students completed Socio-Cognitive Mapping (SCM) questionnaires on their observations of peer affiliations in their grade. SCM has the advantage that students report their own groups as well as other publicly visible groups; almost all sixth graders were covered (observer agreement kappa = .88). Significant associations were determined using binomial-z and Fisher’s exact tests (Kindermann, 2007). Peer group profile scores were computed for each child as the average raw and allocation scores across the members of that child’s group.

Correlations between individuals’ and group members’ raw and allocation scores are presented in Table 2. Overall, only maladaptive raw scores were correlated with the profiles of children’s groups, but the adaptive strategies did not show homophily. Allocation Scores (Table 2), however, showed indications of adaptive peer selection, especially with regard to strategizing, a beneficial strategy related to high academic engagement and performance (Skinner et al, 2013). Allocation scores also showed homophily in most maladaptive coping strategies, but all correlations were reduced.

Our results show that accounting for proportions in the use of coping strategies to standardize for adverse experiences changes the picture of selection processes: Homophily in adaptive coping was only detected after the antecedent amount of experienced stress was controlled. This indicates that, at a time of heightened stress, children form peer groups based on similarity of adverse experiences as well as based on their own coping behavior. The results raise new questions about how peer affiliations can provide contextual resources when individuals lack adaptive strategies in their own coping repertoire.

Authors

• Daniel L Grimes, Portland State University
  Presenting Author

• Brandy A. Brennan, Portland State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Thomas A Kindermann, Portland State University
  Non-Presenting Author