Original articleSpiritual Coping and Psychosocial Adjustment of Adolescents With Chronic Illness: The Role of Cognitive Attributions, Age, and Disease Group
Section snippets
Participants
Participants included 128 adolescents diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (n = 82) or cystic fibrosis (n = 46) and their caregivers. Adolescents (M = 14.7 years, SD = 1.8) included 53% males and 84% Caucasians, 12% African Americans, and 4% other ethnicities. A summary of demographic information is provided in Table 1.
Procedure
University Institutional Review Board approval was obtained. Study procedures have been previously described [16] and are summarized here. Adolescents were recruited during outpatient
Preliminary analyses
The means and standard deviations for continuous variables and percentages for categorical variables are presented in Table 1. Correlations among continuous variables are presented in Table 2. Notably, positive spiritual coping was associated with more optimistic attributional style (p < .001) and fewer caregiver-reported conduct problems (p < .05). Negative spiritual coping was related to higher levels of caregiver-reported conduct problems (p < .05) and self-reported internalizing problems (p
Discussion
Adolescents with chronic illness often struggle with spiritual issues, but our understanding of the role of spiritual coping in their mental health is limited. This study examined the direct effects of positive and negative spiritual coping on adolescents' adjustment, the role of attributions as a mediator of these effects, and age and disease differences in these relationships. Consistent with previous research [7], [8], [9], [10], the results provide support for the importance of spiritual
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Funding/Support: This research was supported in part by grants from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and from the Sigma Xi Grants-in-Aid of Research program to the third author and grant K01DA024700 from the National Institutes of Health to the second author.