A Study On Coping Styles And Intervention Among Normal School Students

In recent years, students of normal schools are in the face of increasing pressure with intense competition. Coping is defined as encompassing all purposeful cognitive and behavioral efforts which are designed to manage such external or internal demands, so as to deal with or balance the subsequent behavior or emotion problems, when facing stress cases or staying in a stress situation. Coping involves all purposeful attempts to relieve stress if they are effective or not. Lots of studies on coping at home and abroad have proved that coping is closely relative to mental health, and it is a key mediator between adaptation and stress. Therefore, it draws lessons from the research findings and experience home and broad and uses the coping strategies to have effective experiments on normal school students. Meanwhile, Group counseling is used to exert interventions on the coping strategies of the training group, which has theoretic and practical implications for their mental health improvement.The approach of sampling in stratification within whole groups was adopted to investigate 578 subjects from Grade one to Grade five in Dongwu Foreign Language Teachers'College. Coping Strategy Questionnaire was used to investigate the basic features of normal school students'coping strategies, and the results were compared with a sample of 30 students who fit the condition. The 30 subjects are distributed into experimental group and control group randomly. There are 15 students in each group. Group counseling is used on experimental group eight times and the training methods conducted are mainly based on cognitive reconstruction and relaxation techniques.The main findings of this study are as follows:1. Their coping strategies for stress include problem solving, help seeking, retreat, fantasy, rationalization and self-blame, whose frequency is from high to low. There are significant gender differences in fantasy coping strategies. Females use fantasy more often than males.2. There are significant grade differences in self-blame, retreat and rationalization among normal schools students. Students of Grade Four use self-blame more often than those of Grade One and Three. Moreover, students of Grade Three, Four and Five use retreat more often than those of Grade One, and students of Grade Three, Four and Five use rationalization more often than those of Grade One. The six coping strategies vary greatly with grades changes.3. Significant region differences exist in help-seeking among normal school students. Help-seeking is used more among students of the towns and less among those from the country sides. There is no significant difference in six coping strategies between the-only-child in one family and not-the-only-child in one family. Both cope positively. However, the-only-child scores higher than not-the-only-child in one family in coping strategies of problem-solving, help-seeking and retreat.4. The intervention brings a significant change to the coping strategies of normal school students. The positive coping strategies of problem-solving and help-seeking are increasing used among the members of the experimental group, while the negative coping strategies of self-blame, fantasy, and retreat are reduced.