This paper aims to understand the general characteristics of middle-school students depending on demographic variables and define the relationship between their self-efficiency level and stress coping strategy.
Especially this thesis puts a main focu...
This paper aims to understand the general characteristics of middle-school students depending on demographic variables and define the relationship between their self-efficiency level and stress coping strategy.
Especially this thesis puts a main focus on religious one out of all the demographic variables, assuming that religious activities might have an effect on youth self-efficiency. So far, there has been the lack of studies on such relation. Therefore, this research is designed to serve as basic data for further studies between self-efficiency and religious activities.
To fulfil the purpose of this study, this paper deals with specific questions as follows.
Firstly, this paper inquires into the relationship between self-efficiency level and demographical variables (age, gender, religion, religious activities, and parents' marital status).
Secondly, it tries to find the relationship between youth self-efficiency levels (high & low) and stress coping strategy.
Lastly, it considers self-confidence as a sub-variable of self-efficiency, which may play one of the biggest roles in youth's stress coping strategy.
To verify the questions above, this study dealt with total 580 male and female students, after randomly extracting five classes of each school year from Middle School A in Suwon, Gyeonggi-do. And it used total 564 copies of questionnaire for actual analysis except incomplete 16 ones.
This study has found the following results.
Firstly, the study has drawn a following conclusion on the relationship between self-efficiency and demographical variables.
1-1 As students get older, they show a higher level of self-efficiency.
1-2 Considering the existing hypothesis that male students have a higher level of self efficiency than that of female students, boys show a significantly higher level of task difficulty preference than girls do. However, as far as self-efficiency is concerned, female students indicate a significantly higher level than that of male students. And, self-confidence does not show a clear difference between genders, giving only partial support for the hypothesis.
1-3 Teenagers who are involved in religious activities have a higher self-efficiency than those who are not.
1-4 The youth who are raised by parents with normal marital status show a meaningfully higher level of self-control & efficiency and task preference than those who are not.
Secondly, youth with higher self-efficiency tend to use an active problem-solving strategy. However, we could not say that those with lower self-efficiency use a passive problem-solving strategy only. Against our expectation, self-control & efficiency and task preference imply a significantly positive relationship with a passive coping strategy, rather, called an emotional alleviation factor.
Thirdly, self-confidence is a sub-type of self-efficiency that plays one of the biggest roles in stress coping strategy.
As a result, this study draws a conclusion on making proposals as follows.
It is necessary to conduct more and more researches on self-efficiency involving religious activities as well as leisure activities, while putting a more importance on developing and applying self-efficiency improving programs.
It is also important to take active and passive coping strategies appropriately under the stressful situations. Therefore, multiple studies should be performed on self-efficiency levels and various stress coping strategies.