Learning 'The Butterfly': Understanding adolescent experiences of stress and coping

Adolescents' experiences of stress and coping have been researched from the perspective of adults' experiences of stress. When young people are directly asked about stressful experience, their responses are different from what adults attribute to them as stressful. The research questions guiding this thesis are: What are the experiences described as stressful by a sample of urban adolescents? How do they describe coping with stressful experiences? The participants are 23 students from an urban middle school who were seventh graders at the time of the study. The pilot study raised questions concerning unexamined theoretical assumptions underlying stress management intervention, and led to a change in the perspective of the research from adult-centric evaluation of a group intervention, to a grounded theory approach to the meaning of stress and coping from the participants' perspective. The students participated in an indepth, open-ended interview study designed to facilitate the emergence of the meaning of stress and coping from their perspectives.;Nine themes associated with experiences of stress and coping were identified in the data. These themes concerned experienced with medical interventions, relationships with siblings, students' relationships with their mothers, references to violent activity in the community, relationships with fathers, experiences at school, strategies used for coping with stressful experience, and the activities most remembered in the pilot stress management groups. A primary axial code of "physicality" was interpreted as a strong integrating code of the data. "Physicality" was defined as students' description of the importance of physical activity and physical expression in their lives, both in connection to the physical and social environment as well as in managing stressful experiences. The central theme of the study was interpreted as "connection," or relationship to others, based on students' depictions of stress associated with threats to connection, such as violent activity; breaks in connection, such as conflictual interactions with siblings; and disconnection from school. Descriptions of coping with stressful experience underscored the importance of maintaining connection to family, to community, and to country of origin.