Culture, coping, and context: Primary and secondary control among Thai andAmerican youth

Do cultural values and traditions influence the development of coping style s ? To address this question, we compared self-reports of coping by 6-14-ye ar-olds in Thailand and the U.S. One hundred and forty-one children were in terviewed about six common stressors: separation from a friend, injection i n a doctor's office, adult anger, peer animosity, school failure, and physi cal injury. Children's self-reported coping methods were coded as overt or covert. Coping goals were coded as reflecting primary control (attempts to influence objective conditions), secondary control (attempts to adjust ones elf to objective conditions), or relinquished control. Although findings re vealed numerous cross-national similarities, there were also multiple main and interaction effects involving culture, suggesting that sociocultural co ntext may be critical to our understanding of child coping. Consistent with literature on Thai culture, Thai children reported more than twice as much covert coping as American children for stressors involving adult authority figures (i.e. adult anger, injection in doctor's office). Thai children al so reported more secondary control goals than Americans when coping with se paration, but American children were five times as likely as Thais to adopt secondary control goals for coping with injury. The findings support a mod el of coping development in which culture and stressor characteristics inte ract, with societal differences most likely to be found in situations where culture-specific norms become salient.