Achievement Goals and Coping Strategies: Identifying the Traditional/Nontraditional Students Who Use Them

We surveyed 178 undergraduates to investigate whether differences exist between traditional and nontraditional students' goal orientations and/or coping strategies and to investigate relationships between goal orientations and coping strategies. Using the variables age, marital status, parental status, and whether time was ever taken off from school, a cluster analysis was used to identify traditional and nontraditional students. Results from a MANOVA indicated that the traditional student cluster scored significantly higher on emotion-oriented coping than did the nontraditional cluster. The implications derived from the results and additional relationships are discussed, along with avenues for future research.