Research On The Relationship Among Paternal Emotional Support,Coping Strategies And Internalizing Problems Of Adolescents

The current research is to investigate the paternal emotional support of adolescents and its impact on the internalizing problems of adolescents,meanwhile,to explore if coping strategies of adolescents play a mediating role between paternal emotional support and internalizing problems.938 junior and senior high school students from Guangzhou were assessed by the paternal emotional support subscale of Kessler's Perceived Social Support(KPSS),Brief Coping Strategies Scale and the anxiety/depression subscale of Youth Self Report.By employing Independent-Samples t-test,One-way Anova,Post Hoc-LSD and Linear Regression including Multiple Regression and Hierarchical Regression to analyze the data,the following results were yielded:(1)the paternal emotional support of adolescents is generally at the middle-andabove the level.It has no significant difference on gender while it differs significantly on years of schooling,family composition and on with or without siblings;students with 3 years of schooling has the most significant difference with those with 4 years of schooling;adolescents in co-parent family perceive significantly higher paternal emotional support than those in single-parent(only father)family.(2)the usage of adaptive coping strategies of adolescents is higher while the usage of maladaptive coping strategies is lower.For adaptive coping strategies,there's no significant difference on gender,family composition,with or without siblings,while having significant differences on years of schooling;3-year-schooling student use adaptive coping strategies significantly lower than 5-year-schooling student.For maladaptive coping strategies,there's no significant difference on gender and years of schooling,while having significant differences on with or without siblings and family composition;adolescents with no siblings use maladaptive coping strategies most frequently;adolescents in single-parent(only father)family use maladaptive coping strategies significantly higher than those in co-parent family.(3)the internalizing problems of adolescents are at middle level;there's no significant difference on years of schooling,with or without siblings,while having significant differences on gender and family composition;female adolescents score significantly higher than male adolescents;adolescents in single-parent(only father)family score significantly higher than those in co-parent family.(4)paternal emotional support,adaptive coping strategies and internalizing problems of adolescents are significantly correlated with each other,while paternal emotional support has no significant correlation with maladaptive coping strategies;paternal emotional support is positively correlated with adaptive coping strategies,while it is negatively correlated with internalizing problems significantly;meanwhile,adaptive coping strategies are negatively correlated with internalizing problems significantly.(5)adaptive coping strategies mediate the effect between paternal emotional support and internalizing problems,which accounts for 17.6% of the total effect.A conclusion can be drawn,with the results above,that adaptive coping strategies mediate the effect between paternal emotional support and internalizing problems of adolescents,which can be elaborated as: the paternal emotional support affects the utilization of adaptive coping strategies first,upon which affects the internalizing problems of adolescents afterwards.Hence,fathers shall attach importance to their role,especially their emotional support in promoting adolescents' health and take responsibility with mothers together.