homeless youths’ competencies in employing active and
social coping strategies, as this may be an area for future
intervention if found lacking.
Limitations
Certain study limitations should be considered in inter-
preting our results. Because our sample included service-
seeking youth who were recruited from agencies connected
to the researchers and were located in a small geographic
area, our ability to generalize results to youth disconnected
from services or to service-seeking youth in other regions
is limited. Additionally, youth who were cognitively im-
paired and intoxicated during the time of assessment were
excluded from this study. This may in turn limit the degree
to which the findings generalize to youth struggling with
these issues. Future research should test the identified
factor structures by administering the Coping Scale with
other diverse samples of homeless youth. Furthermore, due
to the cross-sectional design used in this study we are
unable to make assumptions of causal order. It may,
therefore, be that youth who meet criteria for depressive
episodes were more likely to use certain coping strategies
or that certain coping strategies placed youth at risk for
depression. Although challenging with this transient
population, longitudinal research would allow greater un-
derstanding about causal order of the relationships identi-
fied in our study. In addition, social desirability bias may
have prevented youth from sharing sensitive or personal
information, which may have resulted in underreports of
psychiatric symptoms. Our interviewers were extensively
trained in building rapport, assuring confidentiality, and
establishing privacy during interviews in an effort to re-
duce this bias.
Implications
Despite the identified limitations, the results presented here
have several implications for research and practice. The
newly structured Coping Scale offers a preliminary tool for
assessing coping styles that could have a real impact on
youths’ functioning. However, the tool requires further
refinement and testing. First, because of the aforemen-
tioned limitation regarding the one-item measure of social
coping, future refinement of this scale might consider ad-
ditional items to more fully capture forms of social coping,
such as seeking someone to talk to about the situation
(Folkman and Lazarus 1988) and items that query whom
youth go to for support (e.g., stable adults, trusted family