Coping as Part of Motivational Resilience in School

A study was designed to examine a multidimensional measure of children’s coping in the academic domain as part of a larger model of motivational resilience. Using items tapping multiple ways of dealing with academic problems, including five adaptive ways (strategizing, help-seeking, comfort-seeking, self-encouragement, and commitment) and six maladaptive ways (confusion, escape, concealment, self-pity, rumination, and projection), analyses of self-reports collected from 1,020 third through sixth graders in fall and spring of the same school year showed that item sets marking each way of coping were generally unidimensional and internally consistent; and confirmatory analyses showed that multidimensional models provided a good fit to the data for both adaptive and maladaptive coping at both time points. Of greatest interest were the connections of these ways of coping to the constructs from a model of motivational resilience. As predicted, adaptive coping was positively correlated with students’ self-system processes of relatedness, competence, and autonomy as well as their ongoing engagement and reengagement, and negatively correlated with their catastrophizing appraisals and emotional reactivity. Maladaptive coping showed the opposite pattern of correlations. The potential utility of the measure, the different scores derived from it, and the role of constructive coping in motivational resilience are discussed.