Typologies of coping in young adults in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has created major upheavals in the lives of people worldwide. The virus has mostly affected elderly populations, but there may be corollary effects on young adults’ psychosocial adjustment due to educational, economic, and occupational disruptions. Using latent class analysis, we examined unique typologies of coping in response to the pandemic among young adults. We used an expanded set of indicators including traditional measures of problem- and emotion-focused coping as well as measures of resilience and coping flexibility. We also examined whether class membership could be predicted by demographics, stress appraisal, and psychosocial characteristics including catastrophic thinking and impulsivity. The sample of 1,391 young adults (ages 18–35) was recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and snowball methods from late-April to early-May 2020. Six classes were identified: (1) Resilient Flexible Problem-Focused Copers, (2) Resilient Inflexible Problem-Focused Copers, (3) Non-Resilient Flexible Problem-Focused Venters, (4) Non-Resilient Flexible Problem-Focused Copers, (5) Non-Resilient Flexible Non-Copers, and (6) Non-Resilient Inflexible Non-Copers. Using Class 1 as the reference class, we found perceived centrality and uncontrollability of the pandemic as well as catastrophic thinking and impulsivity were significant predictors of class membership. The mean levels of stress appraisal and psychosocial characteristics varied significantly between the classes, reinforcing the structural validity of these classes. The findings suggest the importance of training young adults to develop resilience and flexibility as well as specific coping skills that can help offset the psychological effects of dramatic lifestyle changes that may result from pandemics or other health crises in the future.

Keywords:

• Coping typologies
• COVID-19 pandemic
• latent class analysis
• stress and coping
• young adults

Notes

1 Universities and colleagues were approached by all the four authors involved in this project via email. These individuals in turn spread the word about the study to their friends and peers. Some of the college students who completed our survey may be outside the PI/first author’s institution, but we did not keep record.

2 The demographic characteristics of the two groups of participants were compared. Participants recruited through MTurk were older; more likely to be female; more likely to be White, Non-Hispanic/Latino/a/x; more likely to have lost a job due to the pandemic; more likely to live alone and less likely to live with a roommate or family; and more likely to have only attended some school (some college or less), more likely to have earned a degree (undergraduate or graduate), and less likely to be current students (undergraduate or graduate). All of these demographic measures were included as model covariates.

3 Significance of the MLR portion of the analysis is based on the p-values of the logits, the confidence intervals of the logits, and the exponentiated confidence intervals of the logits (i.e. asymmetric confidence intervals of the ORs) which give equivalent results. The p-values for the ORs were not used because ORs may not be normally distributed leading to biased tests.