Exploring the Bidirectional Relationship between Early Adolescent Coping Style and Internalizing Symptoms

Rising rates of depression and anxiety among youth represent a significant public health issue with the potential to negatively influence the wellbeing of adolescents and young adults. Early adolescence is a critical developmental period to equip youth with skills to enhance wellbeing and lower risks of internalizing symptoms throughout adolescence. A nuanced understanding of mechanisms, such as coping, among early adolescents is needed to augment prevention and treatment efforts and address the needs of all adolescents. This dissertation study identified relationships between early adolescent active and avoidant coping styles and internalizing symptoms cross-sectionally and over one year using multilevel modeling, with a specific focus on exploring differences by subgroup. This secondary data analysis utilized a longitudinal dataset of a cluster, randomized trial of a preventive intervention from 12 racially/ethnically diverse middle schools in a large public-school district (N=1273, 49% female). The results of the study highlight and further support that coping is a potential mechanism for impacting symptoms of depression and anxiety before and after the onset of symptoms in early adolescence. Symptoms of anxiety and depression affected the type and frequency of coping skills that students employed one year later, indicating that symptoms could precede maladaptive coping in some situations. Reciprocal relationships over time between active coping and depressive symptoms as well as avoidant coping and anxiety symptoms were identified. There were also differences in how gender affected the relationships between types of coping and internalizing symptoms, which should be considered in practice and in future research. Findings suggest implications for future longitudinal research to examine the trajectory of these relationships throughout adolescence in addition to implications for enhancing coping psychoeducation for early adolescents within prevention and intervention programs and models.