Coping with distress among adolescents: Effectiveness of personal narratives on support websites

Sharing, reading and responding to personal narratives on peer-to-peer support websites may provide adolescents with informational and emotional support to feel more confident in coping with stressful events. However, their use may also pose a threat to adolescents' coping self-efficacy. Princi...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Comunicar 2021, Vol.29 (67), p.81-91
Main Authors: Mariën, Sofie, Vandebosch, Heidi, Pabian, Sara, Poels, Karolien
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescents
Beliefs
Coping
Emotions
Environment
Epistemology
Expressive Language
Foreign Countries
Help Seeking
Information Seeking
Online Surveys
Peer Relationship
Peer relationships
Perceptions
Persuasive Discourse
Physical Health
Reading
Responses
Self Efficacy
Self Expression
Sharing Behavior
Social Media
Social support
Social Support Groups
Stress Variables
Teenagers
Web Sites
Websites
Writing (Composition)
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Sharing, reading and responding to personal narratives on peer-to-peer support websites may provide adolescents with informational and emotional support to feel more confident in coping with stressful events. However, their use may also pose a threat to adolescents' coping self-efficacy. Principles of expressive writing, social sharing of emotions, narrative persuasion and self-effects may provide insight in how these actions may both positively and negatively relate to coping self-efficacy. By using a cross-sectional online survey with 311 Dutch-speaking adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18, this article explores how these actions and social support motives (i.e. information-seeking and emotional support-seeking) are related to adolescents' perceptions about the usefulness of these websites to their coping self-efficacy. The results showed a positive relation between adolescents' social support motives and their belief in the usefulness of these websites to their coping selfefficacy. Therefore, we conclude that it may be an effective coping strategy for many adolescents. There was a negative relation between experience with sharing a personal narrative and coping self-efficacy, meaning that these users did not perceive the website to be helpful to their overall confidence in coping with stressful events. However, this negative relation was reversed when they were motivated to find emotional support with similar others.
ISSN:1134-3478
DOI:10.3916/C67-2021-07