The Features Of Higher Vocational College Students' Coping Strategies And Their Effects On Mental Health

In recent years, with social competition turning fierce, the Higher Vocational College students (HVC students) are facing more and more stress. 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 case or staying in a stress situation. Coping includes 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 close relative to mental health, and it is a key mediator between adaptation and stress. Therefore, it is very important to explore the basic features of coping strategies used by HVC students and their effects on mental health, which has theoretic and practical implications for their mental health's improvement.The approach of sampling in stratification within whole groups was adopted to investigate 617 subjects from freshmen to juniors in two higher vocational colleges in BinZhou City. In Study One, Coping Strategy Questionnaire was used to examine the basic features of HVC students' coping strategies, and the results were compared with a sample of 445 university students. In Study Two, Symptom Checklist-90 and Coping Strategy Questionnaire were used to investigate the effects of different coping strategies on HVC students' mental health levels.The main findings of this study are as follows:1. There is difference in the frequency of different coping strategies used by the HVC students. Their coping strategies for stress include problem solving, help seeking, retreat, fantasy, rationalization and self-blame, whose frequency is from high to low.2. There are significant gender and grade differences in coping strategies. Females use help seeking more often than males, and sophomores use problem solving more often than freshmen and juniors. Moreover, there is significant interaction between gender and grade in self-blame, females of Grade Three use more often than females of Grade One.3. With grades increasing, help seeking and rationalization are increasing, problem solving, self-blame and fantasy are fluctuating, and retreat is used less.4.There is significant students resources difference in retreat and self-blame. Fitting in HVC Students use less retreat and self-blame than those who came from senior middle school.5.There is significant difference in retreat and self-blame between HVC students and college ones. Compared with college ones, HVC students use themmore often.6. All the scores of the nine factors and total score of SCL-90 are significantly higher than those of the national norm. And some of the factor scores are also significantly higher than those of the university students' norm. The general rate of HVC students who have psychological problems is 19. 1%, which indicates that the mental health conditions of the HVC students are poor.7. The effects of different coping strategies on mental health are different. The whole level of mental health of HVC students who use problem solving and help seeking more often is significantly higher than that of those who less use them, and the whole level of mental health of students who use retreat, fantasy, rationalization and self-blame more often is significantly lower than that of those who less use them. Additionally, there is significant interaction between self-blame and gender in the whole level of mental health. Among the students who use self-blame excessively, the whole level of mental health of females is lower than that of males.8. Different coping strategies used by the HVC students have different predications for psychological symptoms and the whole level of mental health. Self-blame, problem solving and rationalization are common predictors, and psychological symptoms and the whole level of mental health can be predicted positively by self-blame and rationalization, while problem solving serves as a negative predictor. In addition, help seeking and fantasy can only predict some of the symptoms and the whole level of mental health, and help seeking is a negative predictor, while fantasy is a positive one. However, retreat has no significant predictions for the nine factors and the whole level of mental health.