Gender Comparison of Latent Coping Profiles in a Representative Sample of College Emerging Adults

The present study was intended to improve the understanding of how emerging adults in college cope with stress by identifying latent coping typologies and assessing their relationship to demographic and psychosocial factors. 372 undergraduate students completed a battery and five daily diaries online. The five-day averages of 14 coping methods were used for three latent profile analyses. Initially, four profiles were identified. Repeated analysis revealed similar but not identical models when female and male students were analyzed separately. High Coping and Direct Problem Solving typologies emerged in all models. Coping profiles demonstrated moderate-to-strong relationships with stress, positive and negative affect, psychological symptomatology, and stress-related growth. These results support previous findings that emerging adults display at least three coping typologies, there may be slight differences associated with gender and race/ethnicity, and that using more variety of coping strategies may relate to better stress outcomes.