The Development of a Sense of Coherence and Its Impact on Responses to Stress Situations

This study was carried out on a sample of 418 adolescents attending a regional high school in Israel. Of these, 78 pupils who were about to be evacuated from their homes in the Sinai settlements comprised the study sample. The comparison group was made up of their 340 classmates, who lived in other communities. The emotional responses to stress in these adolescents (state anxiety) were measured 1 week before and 6 weeks after the evacuation. Hypotheses were tested about the impact of the sense of coherence on the emotional response to stress and about a number of factors conducive to the development of a stronger or weaker sense of coherence in adolescents. The central findings are that stability of community, age, and sex were related to the development of the sense of coherence in adolescence. The sense of coherence was negatively related to state anxiety responses in a “normal” potentially ego-threatening stress situation but showed no relationship to emotional responses to the acute communal stress situation, the evacuation.