Qualitative thematic coding was conducted on respondent’s short narratives to identify appraised sources of significant stress.
Respondents described the most stressful situation encountered over the past 4 weeks.
Narratives from all baseline and follow-up interviews were examined for common themes across time.
A total of 726 themes were coded from responses available for 113 participants.
There descriptions were first independently categorized by the author to identify bucket codes that reflected dominant and recurrent themes in the data.
The code list was given to a graduate-level secondary coder to re-categorize the themes.
Consensus coding between both coders was then carried out on all qualitative data to enhance validity of the results.
Subthemes within dominant themes were also identified.
Qualitative analyses were performed using SPSS Version 20.0 for Windows.
A series of one-sample t-tests was conducted to compare coping style reliance in the present sample with normative general population means.
To test coping style effectiveness, a series of multiple regression models was estimated to determine whether each of the three coping style were predictive of concurrent levels of perceived coping efficacy and perceived stress.
For the regression analyses, the three coping style variables were centered on their respective means in order to reduce multicollinearity.
All three coping style variables were entered simultaneously into the regression models.
Data screening revealed no outliers or influential cases.
Tolerance and variance inflation factor values were acceptable indicating the absence of multicollinearity.