ABSTRACT.
The author investigated A. Antonovsky’s (1979) concept of the sense of coherence (SOC) in relation to social support, coping styles, and the stress experiences of college students. A multivariate model was used to assess the relationships between the psychosocial resources, perceived stress, and the effect of different coping styles among 261 undergraduate students in three Israeli institutions of higher education. Results of a multivariate analysis of variance revealed that younger students used more emotional strategies and perceived having greater social support from friends than did older students. Students who did not work reported experiencing higher levels of stress associated with daily life and work-related issues. Women used more emotional and avoidance coping strategies. The findings of the regression analysis demonstrated that task-oriented and emotional coping modes, work stress, and family support explained 30% of the variance of SOC. These results increase our understanding of the salutogenic model of students within university settings and suggest focusing on the students and their interaction with the environment, using the concepts of stress, coping, and social support as inseparable characteristics of systems models.
Key words: coping, salutogenic model, stress, support, university students
THE SALUTOGENIC MODEL, developed by Aaron Antonovsky (1979, 1987), focused on exploring the origin of health rather than explaining the causes of disease. The salutogenic approach is an alternative perspective to the traditional pathogenic model; it is an approach that looks for the health-promoting factors within individuals and societies. In contrast to the pathological orientation (the health vs. disease dichotomy), in Antonovsky’s model, health is viewed as a continuum from health (ease) to disease (dis-ease). The author suggested that the individual’s cognition of and mode of response to the environment and to stress may be important in promoting good health (Antonovsky, 1998).
The salutogenic model highlights the strengths of individuals and their capacity for successful adjustment and tries to explain why certain people seem to preserve health and well-being and successfully cope with tension and the exposure to life’s stresses and difficulties. If stress is handled well, its outcome can be positive or neutral, and the individual moves toward the health- ease end of the continuum, whereas if stress is poorly handled, the person moves toward the dis-ease end of the continuum.
Antonovsky (1979) developed the concept of sense of coherence (SOC) as central to his salutogenic model, which is a global orientation that expresses a general view of individuals regarding their internal and external environment. Social, historical, and cultural context and life experiences are the foundations of an individual’s degree of SOC. Within the SOC, Antonovsky (1987, p. 19) identified three main resources that may help facilitate individuals’ positive adjustment, how they deal with challenges, and how they cope with difficulties: These resources are revealed by the extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring though dynamic, feeling of confidence that (a) the stimuli derived from one’s internal and external environments are comprehensible, structured, predictable, and explicable; (b) the sources are manageable and available; and (c) demands are meaningful, challenging, and worthy of investment and engagement.
In other words, to optimize the chances of successfully coping with stress, individuals must feel that they understand the task, have the needed resources at their disposal, and view the task as a challenge. Individuals who perceive their world as comprehensible and a situation as meaningful are able to select strategies to cope with stress; they view a situation as manageable, and they feel capable of controlling it. These constructs lead to an individual’s SOC (Antonovsky, 1987). Individuals with a strong SOC, although conscious of difficulties or frustrations, do not ignore them, are more confident that basic difficulties will be resolved or can be dealt with, and have confidence that they will be able to cope with the inherent pressures of daily life (Antonovsky, 1979).
In previous studies, SOC has been related to coping, locus of control, problem solving, and self-esteem (Jahnsen, Villien, Straghelle, & Holm, 2002), and to emotional, social, and behavioral variables (Kaiser, Sattler, Bellack, & Dersin, 1996; Langius, Bjoervell, & Antonovsky, 1992). Soderfeldt (2000) found that SOC was negatively correlated with job pressure and positively related to social support. Soderfeldt suggested that individuals with lower SOC scores were more anxious. In addition, SOC has been suggested as defining an overall ability to cope with life stress (Nilsson, Holmgren, Stegmayr, & Wesrman, 2003). A survey of undergraduate students showed that SOC was negatively associated with psychological distress and anxiety, and a significant positive relation was found between SOC, work relations, and competence (Harri, 1998).
College and university attendance is regarded as a positive event that provides great opportunities for individual development and represents a critical developmental period for older adolescents and young adults, in which students enter a new social environment where they must adjust to new social norms and establish new relationships (Tao, Dong, Pratt, Hunsberger, & Pancer, 2000). Yet, this experience is also accompanied by multiple and significant changes, stress, and challenges in academic, social, and emotional areas. These developmental challenges can be acutely stressful (Cutrona, 1982). In the present study, I examined the concept of SOC in the college setting and investigated the relationship between SOC, social support, coping style, and the stress experiences of college students.
Support Resources
Antonovsky (1987) proposed “generalized resistance resources” such as money, faith, and social support, that help individuals perceive the world as an organized and structured reality. Social support can make life more manageable and understandable and can assist the individual in making decisions. A number of studies have noted that measures of social help and support seem to be related to SOC, and a strong SOC increases the chance that a person will discover support resources that will help in handling stress. Relationships with parents are often overlooked as a variable that can influence or predict a student’s academic and personal adjustment to college (Kenny & Perez, 1996; Lopez, 1991; Winter & Sugar, 2000; Winter & Yaffe, 2000). A secure relationship with parents facilitates adjustment and is negatively associated with psychological symptoms of distress at the time of entering college. Family support has been strongly related to adjustment and social relationships (Gurung, 1992) and even in academic areas when students have reported that they got help from family and friends (Heiman & Precel, 2003).
Coping Style
Social support is viewed as an important resource for encouraging adaptive coping strategies (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Differences in the conceptualization of coping have led to a number of ways of classifying coping strategies. Lazarus and Folkman offered a widely used definition of coping-constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external or internal demands. They developed three main theoretical assumptions regarding coping strategies (task-oriented, emotion-oriented, and avoidance). The task-oriented coping style stresses an active reaction strategy and focuses on efforts directed at modifying or managing a situation. In emotion-oriented coping, efforts are directed at altering emotional responses to stress. The third strategy, avoidance, includes strategies such as avoiding the situation, denying its existence, losing hope, or making indirect efforts to adjust to a situation by distancing oneself from it or evading the problem (Lazarus & Folkman; Roth & Cohen, 1986).
The first two strategies involve pro-active efforts to alter the situation, whereas avoidance strategy is characterized by the absence of attempts to alter the situation and represents withdrawal behavior. Pro-active coping strategies have been related to better adjustment (Causey & Dubow, 1993; Compas, Malcarne, & Fondacaro, 1988), whereas avoidance has been related to poorer adjustment (Billings & Moos, 1981). Endler and Parker (1990) suggested that in the long run, task-oriented coping is the most efficacious strategy. Hollahan and Moos (1987) found that individuals with greater family support were more likely to rely on approach coping and less likely to use avoidance coping styles.
Stressors
College students perceive academic life as stressful and demanding (Hammer, Grigsby, & Woods, 1998; Wan, 1992) and report experiencing emotional reactions to this stress, especially as a result of external pressures and self-imposed expectations (Misra & McKean, 2000). SOC has been shown to be an important factor in coping with stress. Antonovsky (1998) believed that for adults, the work environment was the most important setting in determining an individual’s \SOC. Thus, work can strengthen SOC when expectations are known and consistent; the worker feels that he or she has the resources to competently complete job tasks and believes that there is a shared sense of responsibility.
Age differences regarding support sources, stress, and coping have yielded inconsistent results. Hamarat, Thompson, Zabrucky, Steele, & Matheny (2001) indicated that stress decreases with age at the same time that social support increases with age. As a variable, gender can affect the way in which individuals manifest stress outcomes. Results of various studies indicated the presence of gender differences, with women generally reporting a higher level of stress (Brimblecombe & Ormston, 1996; De-Anda, Bradley, & Collada, 1997; Zeidner, Klingman, & Itskowitz, 1993) and greater social support (Reevy & Maslach, 2001) than do men. Lee, Keough, and Sexton (2002), who examined the effects of social appraisal of the campus climate and perceived stress of college women and men, found that social connectedness was more negatively related to perceived stress for men than for women.
The salutogenic orientation, as suggested by Antonovsky, is offered as a basis of a person’s perception of his or her world and viewed as a concept of health promotion. In his model, Antonovsky (1987) sought to explain successful coping with stress by SOC and to relate SOC to emotional, social, and behavioral measures. Accordingly, a person with a strong SOC is less likely to perceive a situation as stressful than a person with a weak SOC.
Although SOC has been studied extensively in groups experiencing a variety of stress, it has not often been examined in students. College students could be guided in ways to strengthen SOC, thereby increasing their chances of success. Thus, there is a need to explore the relationship of SOC to academic coping strategies with populations that are experiencing stress related to academic tasks or work load. Consequently, to investigate students’ support resources and strategies for coping with academic tasks, I formulated the following research questions:
1. Do students’ background characteristics (gender, age, family status, and work) differentiate among the self-reported measures?
2. How is SOC related to students’ reports on coping strategies, various stresses, and different sources of social support?
3. To what extent do the different measures (coping, support, and stress) predict SOC in adult students?
I expected students with a strong SOC to be more task-oriented, to perceive having a higher level of support, and to experience lower stress than students with a weak SOC.
Method
Participants
The participants were 261 undergraduate students (115 men and 146 women) ranging in age from 20 to 55 years (mean age was 28.7, SD = 7.06), studying social sciences (education, management, economics, psychology, and sociology) in three institutions of higher education in the central part of Israel: 51 students were from a traditional campus university, 104 were from a distance-learning university, and 106 were from an academic college of management. Table 1 contains the biographical information of the students. I performed a chi- square analysis to determine whether there were differences among the three institutions of higher education according to the background variables of gender, age, family status, and work. No significant differences were found for these variables. Therefore, I treated the participants as one group, regardless of the educational institution they were attending. Because of the wide age spread (from 20 to 55), I divided the students into two groups by median: younger students (aged 20 to 27; n = 126) and older students (aged 28 and older; n = 135). Within the younger group, most of the students were not married, or if married, they had no children (96.3%), whereas most of the students in the older group were married and had children (82.6%).
TABLE 1. Biographical Information of the Students (N = 261)
Measures
Four instruments were used in this study. A biographical survey was used to collect information on age, gender, marital status, institution, and work status.
The Sense of Coherence Scale (SOC; Antonovsky, 1987) was used to assess the students’ SOC in their world, expressing thoughts, feelings, and expected behavior regarding their lives. The scale consists of 13 items on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from always (1) to never (7), in which a higher score expresses a higher SOC. For example, to express a sense of comprehensibility: “When you talk to people, do you have the feeling that they don’t understand you?” To express the sense of manageability: “When you have a difficult problem, the choice of a solution is . . .” (responses ranged from “always confusing and hard to find” to “always completely clear”). And to express meaningfulness: “You anticipate that your personal life in the future will be . . .” (responses ranged from “totally without meaning” to “full of meaning and purpose”).
Internal consistency reliability coefficients (Cronbach alphas) have been reported to be between .86 and .95 (Antonovsky, 1993). In the present study, an internal consistency estimate of .72 was found. Criterion validity was examined by Antonovsky by presenting significant correlational data between SOC and measures in four domains: (a) global orientation to oneself and one’s environment; (b) stress; (c) health, illness, and well-being; and (d) attitudes and behavior.
The Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS; Endler & Parker, 1999) consists of 41 items arranged on a 5-point Likert- type scale from not suitable at all (1) to very suitable (5). Three subscales describe the individual’s coping strategy: (a) Task Orientation (16 items); (b) Emotional Orientation (14 items); and (c) Avoidance (11 items). Higher scores on each scale indicate frequent use of the strategy. For this sample, test-retest correlation coefficients over a 9-month period averaged .89 for task orientation, .87 for emotional orientation, and .83 for avoidance.
The Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS; Zimet, Dahlem, Zimet, & Farley, 1988) consists of 12 items arranged on a 7-point Likert-type scale from not suitable at all (1) to very suitable (7). Three subscales describe the individual’s social support from (a) Family (4 items), (b) Friends (4 items), and (c) a Significant Other (4 items). Scores on each of these scales range from 1 to 28; a higher score expresses higher social support. Cronbach’s alpha for the entire scale for this sample was .92; for family, .91; friends, .89; and significant other, .90. Concurrent validity was suggested by significant correlations of .43 between family and friends’ support, .62 between family and significant other, and .55 between friends’ and significant other’s support.
Three questions were posed regarding a feeling of stress in daily life and academic stress: (a) “How much stress do you feel due to academic studies?” (b) “How much stress do you feel due to your work?” (c) “How much stress do you feel in your daily life?” Students answered on a 4-point Likert-type scale ranging from feel great stress (4) to feel no stress (1). Higher scores are indicative of greater stress. Test-retest correlation coefficients (over a 9- month period) were found to be .45 between academic stress and daily stress and .46 between work stress and daily stress.
Procedure
Students were randomly selected from regular classes and participated in the study voluntarily. The author introduced herself to the students, presenting herself as interested in students’ perceptions of academic studies and how they coped with them and guaranteeing anonymity. Participants provided biographical information and completed the self-report questionnaires on coping strategies, social support, stress, and SOC.
Results
I performed a multivariate analysis of variance with student backgrounds (gender, age group, family status, and work status) as the independent variables and the total scores of each of the dependent variables: (a) coping strategies, (b) support sources, (c) stress perception, and (d) SOC. For this analysis, the effect sizes were calculated by using eta-squared. The results revealed significant main effect for gender, F(1, 260) = 4.29, p
Regarding age (older or younger), findings showed that the older group reported more task-oriented coping and reported higher perceived SOC, whereas the younger students reported more emotional coping and greater support from friends and from significant others. Regarding gender, the univariate analyses showed that the women reported more emotional and avoidance coping strategies, higher academic stress, and lower perceived SOC than did the men (see Table 2).
TABLE 2. Means, Standard Deviations, and F Scores for Coping Strategies, Support Sources, Stress, and Sense of Coherence (SOC) Variables by Age Group and Gender (N= 261)
In addition, the follow-up tests regarding work status (worked or did not work) revealed that the nonworking students demonstrated more emotional coping strategies than the working group and that the students who worked reported having higher stress concerning work issues and daily life issues than those who did not work. There were no significant findings for the independent variable of family status. Means, standard deviations, and F values of the univariate analysis regarding age groups, gender, and work status are presented in Tables 2 and 3.
To examine the relations between the different aspects of students’ self-repo\rts and SOC, I performed Pearson correlations. Results indicated that (a) for coping strategies, SOC was correlated positively with task-oriented strategies and negatively with emotional strategies and with avoidance; (b) for sources of social support, SOC was correlated significantly only with family support; and (c) stress measures (academic stress, work stress, and daily life stress) were negatively correlated with SOC. In other words, students with a higher SOC used more task-oriented strategies and fewer emotional or avoidance coping; they perceived their family support as stronger and felt less stress in their academic lives, in working situations, and in daily life (see Table 4).
TABLE 3. Means, Standard Deviations, and F Scores for Coping Strategies, Support Sources, Stress, and Sense of Coherence (SOC) by Work Status
TABLE 4. Correlations Between Pearson Correlation for Sense of Coherence (SOC) and Coping Strategies, Support Sources, and Stress Variables
I computed multiple regressions to examine the effects of coping strategies, stress, and support sources on students’ SOC. I included the control variables of gender, age, working or not working, and family status. The independent variables of coping, stress, and support were entered as a block, and the control variables were added to the equation in a second step in block form. The regression analyses are presented in Table 5. Coping, stress, and support explained 30% (p
Discussion
In the current study, I attempted to characterize the concept of SOC in college students and its relation to social and emotional variables. The study was based on Antonovsky’s (1998) salutogenic theory, which proposed that when individuals with a strong SOC face stress, they are motivated to adjust to the situation, find the challenge to be comprehensible, and believe that support sources will help them to adjust to and manage the situation. Although a stronger SOC helps individuals to use the most suitable social resources to confront stress, they can also learn from past failures.
The results support the first assumption that individual resources, such as coping strategies, perceived support sources, stress, and SOC differ according to students’ background characteristics. The findings also revealed significant differences regarding proactive coping strategies (task oriented and emotion oriented), in which older students were more task oriented and younger students used more emotional coping strategies. Women reported more emotional and avoidance coping strategies than men did, and unemployed students used more emotional coping strategies than did employed students.
TABLE 5. Regression Analyses of Coping, Support Sources, and Stress on Sense of Coherence
As Roth and Cohen (1986) noted, proactive coping comprises various cognitive, behavioral, and emotional activities that are oriented to reduce stress, whereas the avoidance style reflects activities oriented away from the stress. The approach or avoidance model of coping may provide a useful conceptual framework for students in higher education by indicating that men and women and younger students and older students choose different coping strategies to reduce stress. In keeping with Endler and Parker’s (1990) division of coping strategies, we can assume that in the long run, students using proactive coping strategies (behavioral and emotional) will be better adjusted than students who use negative or avoidance strategies. Longitudinal studies are needed to examine students’ future adjustment.
Consistent with previous studies regarding the contribution of social support to SOC perception, in which social support can make life more manageable and understandable and can assist in making decisions (Antonovsky, 1998; Lusting, Rosenthal, Strauser, & Haynes, 2000), the present study results revealed that students with strong sources of support demonstrated overall positive SOC. Younger students perceived stronger support from friends and others than did the older students. As most of the younger students were not married, we can assume that the support needed came from friends rather than spouses.
Results also revealed the presence of greater academic stress reported by women, which can be explained in terms of gender differences as found in previous studies on stress (Brimblecombe & Ormston, 1996; De-Anda et al., 1997). In addition, employed students expressed a higher rate of work stress and daily life stress than did the unemployed students.
Previous studies examining the SOC within various populations obtained varied results regarding age and gender. For example, in previous examinations of adults (Drory & Florian, 1998), no significant differences were found for age or gender. Within a Swedish adult population (Nilsson et al., 2003), the SOC score showed that women seemed to be more affected by social changes than did men, which influenced their SOC, and in another study of patients with HIV, women’s scores indicated significantly less positive well-being, weaker SOC, and lower social support than men’s scores (Cederfjall, Langius-Eklof, Lindman, & Wredling, 2001).
In the present sample, we found that the older group of students reported a higher SOC than did the younger group, and men reported a higher SOC than did women. One interpretation of this finding may be that, as women are more sensitive to social or environmental changes (Nilsson et al., 2003), they reported a weaker SOC. Another suggestion is based on a previous study by Harri (1998), who found that SOC was negatively related to stress. That finding could explain the gender differences found here, in which women reported higher academic stress and lower SOC. Because no previous studies have examined university students, it would be worthwhile to consider a further examination of these measures among students.
As we expected, coping strategies and stress measures, as well as family support, were significantly correlated with SOC. These results reaffirm Antonovsky’s (1998) claim that intensified perceived stress, as described by the participant, is negatively correlated with a strong SOC. The correlation between SOC and coping has been described in previous research (Sadan, Bareli, & Rubin, 1998), pinpointing the positive relation between SOC and active coping and confirming the contribution of active coping to stressful aspects of daily life. The self-report on coping measures used in this study appears to be a promising tool for assessing how students cope with daily stress.
The results of the regression analysis show the contribution of the dependent variables (such as coping strategies, family support, and work stress) to SOC, whereas the background measures of age and gender did not contribute to perceived SOC. The findings indicated that higher SOC can be predicted by more task-oriented strategies and fewer emotional coping strategies, family support, and reduced work stress. Conversely, a person with a higher perceived SOC tends to cope actively with a situation, with the help of higher sources of familial support and lower stress perception. On the basis of these results, we can assume that having social support, effective coping strategies, and perceptions of lower stress may enhance one’s SOC. We can also assume that the impact of environmental variables such as stress, social support, and coping strategies has a stronger effect on students’ SOC than does age or gender. Although Antonovsky (1998) argued that it is important to take into consideration jobs and specific places of employment as contributors to strengthened SOC, in the current study, there was not enough variance between students who worked and those who did not; thus, the work status did not significantly contribute to the regression for SOC.
Conclusions based on the results of this study are limited by the following considerations: First, the sample may not be representative of the university population. As the participants were students of the social sciences only, the nature of the data suggests that the interpretation of the results should be limited to the sample examined at the time of the study. Additional research is needed to examine the construct of SOC among students with different course specialties. A larger sample with cross-sectional data should be considered. Second, causal conclusions concerning the relationship between SOC and the different measures should be considered with caution. Although Antonovsky (1987) theorized that there is a causal relationship between SOC and positive adjustment, the current findings should be interpreted with prudence. Finally, our data were entirely self-reported: Both social and emotional variables were measured with single questionnaires. Future studies should use additional measures, including work and family measures.
The results of this study underline the importance of designing a longitudinal study to investigate the relationship between stress and SOC among students. This would provide insight into how SOC may change over time after the onset of stress. Although Antonovsky (1987) theorized that SOC is a stable trait, he also stated that significant life events or emotional changes may affect an individual’s SOC. Thus, a longitudinal study could provide a rich source of information specific to coping with stress. Further research should also differentiate between students’ modes of coping with an academic load under stressful conditions and investigate how students’ needs are met through resources and support systems and how they interact with the complex demands of institutions of higher education.
The social significance of the salutogenic model can serve as a guide to providing interventions direct\ed toward stress reduction, strengthening social support, and enhancing various coping strategies. Within universities, it would be helpful to develop coping strategies suited to students’ personal characteristics (e.g., age, gender, work status, perception of stress) that could contribute to their competencies and particularly affect their future success.
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Original manuscript received April 25, 2003
Final revision accepted March 3, 2004
TALI HEIMAN
Department of Education and Psychology
The Open University of Israel
Address correspondence to Tali Heiman, Department of Education and Psychology, The Open University, The Dorothy de Rothschild Campus, 108 Ravutski Street, Raanana, 43107, Israel; [email protected] (e-mail).
Copyright HELDREF PUBLICATIONS Nov 2004
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