Pragmatic measures of middle school student stress and coping: Concurrent and prospective relations with depression

This study examined the technical properties of single-item measures of stress and coping, their patterns of responses, and their associations with depression among a group of 814 middle school students. We examined the temporal stability and intercorrelations of the items with each other and with a measure of depressive symptoms at baseline and at 6- and 18-month followups. The measures demonstrated comparable test-retest reliability as multi-item measures of stress and coping reported in prior studies. Their intercorrelations and relations with depressive symptoms also were very consistent with prior research using longer measures. We next conducted a latent profile analysis of the students' self-reported levels of stress and coping at the beginning of the school year and used the resulting profiles to predict depressive symptoms over time. Four profiles were found characterized by the following: high stress and high coping (14 %), low stress and low coping (27 %), high stress and low coping (13 %), and low stress and high coping (46 %). The least adaptive profile, high stress/low coping, had the highest risk of clinically significant depressive symptoms at each time point. Nearly two-thirds of students in the least adaptive profile had elevated depression at baseline compared to only 4 % of students in the low stress/high coping group. Examining stress and coping in combination using single-items can inform efforts to improve student well-being.