Coping with Distal and Proximal Stressors: A Transactional Model of Stress Among First-Year Undergraduate Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The transition to post-secondary education has been cited as a period of high stress, and increased rates of mental health concerns among undergraduate samples suggest that many students are poorly equipped to cope with this transition. The current study utilized the transactional model of stress (Folkman & Lazarus, 1984) to address the need for a comprehensive model of stress and coping among undergraduate students. A sample of first-year undergraduate students completed self-report questionnaires within the initial months of their first term (Time 1; n= 788) and again within the final months of their second term (Time 2; n= 621). Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the associations among stress and coping variables at the start of the year, including distal stressors, proximal stressors, appraisal of stressors, coping strategies, and emotion regulation strategies, with mental health outcomes at the end of the year, including depression, anxiety, and life satisfaction. Results indicated that stress and coping variables at the start of the year explained almost half (45.3%) of the variability in mental health outcomes at the end of the year. Taken together, the structural model provides a useful framework for the conceptualization, assessment, and treatment of stress-related mental health concerns among first-year undergraduate students. Clinical implications and directions for future research and theory development are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".