The Relationship of Religious and General Coping to Psychological Adjustment and Distress in Urban Adolescents

The present study explored the relationships among stress, general and religious coping, and mental health in a sample of urban adolescents. The participants included 587 9th- through 12th-grade students attending two Catholic high schools in the New York City area. They completed a set of self-report measures assessing perceived stress, religious coping, general coping, clinical symptomology, positive and negative affect, and life satisfaction. Correlation and regression analyses were used to describe relationships among variables. Perceived stress, negative religious coping, and avoidant coping were significantly associated with indicators of psychological distress. Conversely, positive religious coping and active/engagement coping were significantly associated with indicators of psychological adjustment. Negative religious coping also was found to moderate the relationship between perceived stress and positive affect. Finally, partial correlational analyses revealed significant relationships between religious coping and mental health indicators, even after controlling for the contributions of general coping. Implications of the findings for research and clinical practice with adolescent populations are considered.