Social support and psychosocial competence: Explaining the adaptation to college of ethnically diverse students

Abstract

Examined relationships among social support, psychosocial competence, and adaptation to college in a sample of 357 African American, Asian American, Latino, and white college students. Social support and active coping were significant predictors of adaptation to college, whereas locus of control was not. However, there was an interaction between ethnicity and locus of control indicating that although internal African American, Latino, and white students had higher adaptation-to-college scores than external students, the opposite was true for Asian Americans. The relationships among social support, internality, and active coping were also explored. Satisfaction with social support and internality were positively related to active coping, but locus of control and social support were unrelated. Active coping and internality were significantly related to each other for all groups except for African Americans. Although most relationships were the same across groups, these findings call attention to the role of ethnicity as a moderator of college adjustment processes.

Family relationships and college adjustment of first-generation college students

“…Prior academic achievement will be statistically controlled with high school rank. In addition, since psychological coping is also known to impact college adjustment (Brooks & DuBois, 1995;Daugherty & Lane, 1999;Kerr, 1995;Larose, Robertson, Roy, & Legault, 1998;Wintre & Yaffe, 2000;Zea, Jarama, & Bianchi, 1995), hierarchical regression analyses will be used to show the effect of the family relationship variable on the adjustment factors for these students beyond what is already accounted for by prior academic achievement and psychological coping skills.…”

“…In fact, psychological well-being was the most important contributor to overall college adjustment for a largely female college population from a Canadian commuter university (Wintre & Yaffe, 2000). Student coping style contributed significant variance to overall adaptation to college (Feenstra et al, 2001) and an active coping style was also effective in improving retention (Zea et al, 1995). For firstgeneration college students, prior achievement contributed to the variance in GPA for the first semester (Ting, 1998) and high school preparation for college significantly narrowed the success gap between these students and their peers (Warburton et al, 2001).…”

“…Mood state at the beginning of the year was associated with first-year college adjustment (Stevens & Walker, 1996) as well as attrition (Daugherty & Lane, 1999) and 9% of the variance in academic development was explained by emotional and mental health variables alone (Kerr, 1995). Psychosocial competence and coping significantly predicted adaptation to college (Feenstra et al, 2001;Wintre & Yaffe, 2000;Zea et al, 1995). For this reason, psychological coping was another variable that had to be controlled in order to provide an accurate picture of the effect that family relationship dynamics had on college adjustment.…”

“…College adjustment has been found to be associated with family relationship dynamics (Armsden & Greenberg, 1987;Bradford & Lyddon, 1993;Feenstra et al, 2001 ;Haemmerlie et al, 1994;Kalsner & Pistole, 2003;Kemp & Neimeyer, 1999;Kenny & Donaldson, 1991Kenny & Perez, 1996;Lapsley & Edgerton, 2002;Lapsley et al, 1989;Mallinckrodt, 1992;Protinsky & Gilkey, 1996;Rice et al, 1995;Rice & Whaley, 1994;Strage, 1998;Strage & Brandt, 1999;Wintre & Sugar, 2000) and psychological coping (Brooks & DuBois, 1995;Feenstra et al, 2001;Kerr, 1995;Larose et al, 1998;Stevens & Walker, 1996;Wintre & Yaffe, 2000;Zea et al, 1995). In addition, studies have shown that family relationship dynamics impact the adjustment of college students even with prior academic achievement controlled (Brooks & DuBois, 1995;Cutrona et al, 1994) and another found family dynamics to be associated with adaptation to college even after factoring out individual student coping (Feenstra et al, 2001).…”

“…A positive support system predicted the use of active coping. An active coping style was effective in improving retention (Zea et al, 1995) and adaptation to college (Feenstra et al, 2001). Similarly, academic and socio-emotional college adjustment was found to be influenced by student problem-solving skills and emotional stability, in addition to prior academic performance, for a small sample of students from a public mid-western university (Brooks & DuBois, 1995).…”