Social support: Relations to coping and adjustment during the transition to university in the People's Republic of China

Life transitions, such as university attendance, entail the reconstruction of relations between the individual and the environment. This study aimed t o explore how perceptions of social support changed across rime during the first semester of university, and how social support, coping strategies, an d adjustment were interrelated among 390 first-year students in Beijing, Ch ina. Results indicated that overall levels of social support among students did not change significantly across the first term, but that support from different sources (parents, peers, teachers, siblings) showed distinctive p atterns of change. Support was positively related to adjustment and to copi ng skills in a dynamic way, and an integrative structural equations model s howed that the role of social support operated both directly in relation to adjustment and indirectly through its relations to coping styles. These fi ndings were related both to previous research on the transition to universi ty in the West and to unique factors within the Chinese context.