Comparison of Coping Strategies Used by Adolescents on State and Trait Anxiety

The current study was designed to investigate the difference in use of coping strategies among adolescents with respect to state and trait anxiety. The study consisted of 200 adolescents, equal number of boys and girls, belonging to different colleges of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The age limit of these participants was 12-18 years. Two scales were used for this purpose: State and Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) (Spielberger, Gorsuch & Lushene, 1970) to measure state anxiety and trait anxiety among adolescents. Brief COPE (Akhtar, 2005) was used to identify different coping strategies that adolescents use to cope with state and trait anxiety. The results of the study concluded that active avoidance and religious/denial coping strategies are positively associated with state and trait anxiety on the other hand problem-focused and positive coping strategies are negatively associated with state and trait anxiety. Moreover, girls score higher on state and trait anxiety as compared to boys. Results also indicate that girls use more active-avoidance and religious/denial coping strategies whereas boys use more problem-focused and positive coping strategies. The findings of the present study also suggest that state and trait anxiety are positively predicting active avoidance and religious/denial coping strategies and negatively predicting problem-focused and positive coping strategies. Overall, the result of the present study revealed that there is a difference in the use of coping strategies with respect to state and trait anxiety.