The promotion and measurement of healthy coping

Contemporary society is failing to meet the developmental needs of its youth. Social and cultural changes have created an urgent need for nursing interventions that promote healthy development in young people struggling with role ambiguity, the breakdown of family and social support networks, and a future that seems vague or even nonexistent. A nursing intervention that seems to be effective is peer counseling. Peer leaders with specific training and continued supervision by nurse counselors can have an impact on healthy development. In order to examine the outcome of peer counseling on coping patterns, a group of 102 adolescents who had received peer counseling was compared with two control groups (n — 134 and 104) not having received peer counseling. There were 209 young women and 131 young men in the study. Both male and female subjects were included in the study in the interest of gender‐fair research (Grady, 1981). The A‐COPE, a reliable and valid instrument developed by Patterson and McCubbin (1983) was administered to the 340 young people. Analysis of variance and the Scheffé test of statistical analysis of the data revealed significantly different coping patterns among the counseled and control groups.