This is the first of a series of final report volumes on the Project, Coping Styles and Achievement: A Cross-National Study of School Children. The study was designed to develop a conceptual system for describing effective coping behavior in several cultures; to develop measures of coping style and coping effectiveness which would be uniformly…

Since the 1950's psychological research has attempted to define adaptive behavior, i.e., competence. To develop a system for explaining effective behavior, an international team of researchers developed a conceptualization of competent behavior which included three components: coping behaviors, motivation, and attitudes. A set of internationally…

Psychologists and educators have become interested in the development of a child's social and emotional abilities as well as cognitive outcomes. To determine the important coping patterns that predict success in school, a sample of 10- and 14-year old children (N=3600) from the U.S.A., Brazil, Italy, and Mexico completed a multi-lingual battery of…

This study undertook to develop an improved conceptual system for explaining effective behavior; to build reliable measures of the components of that behavior; to develop and apply the measures internationally; and to validate the measures and concepts against objective criteria of achievement. An eight-nation team defined three sets of components…

Five hundred twenty-two Anglo, 99 Black and 127 Chicano sixth-graders, in 53 classes were individually rated by randomized, tri-ethnic, classmate panels on work habits, self-control and interpersonal behavior. Self-ratings and achievement tests were also obtained. Analysis of variance tested for ethnic effects in raters, ratees and rater-ratee…

This report is the fourth in a series of seven, all of which are concerned with coping styles of school children in the U.S.A., Brazil, Mexico, England, West Germany, Italy, and Yugoslavia. For this study, a lengthy structured interview was held with the mothers of 10 percent of the 6,400 children who had been tested in Stage I of the…

The Cross-National Study of Coping Styles and Achievement was designed to develop a conceptual system for describing effective coping behavior in several cultures; to develop measures of coping style and coping effectiveness which would be uniformly applicable in the various cultures; and to determine the relationship of such coping behavior to…

Interviews were conducted with all of the mothers and about half of the fathers of a stratified sample of school children whose achievement, motivation, occupational interests and coping styles had been assessed. The parents of 80 children in each of eight countries participated: Brazil, Mexico, England, West Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, Japan, and…

The 3 major papers of a symposium are included. Primary emphases are on: (1) problems of conceptualizing and measuring coping behavior in 8 cultures; (2) the effect of socio-cultural premises on coping behavior; and (3) the influence of social class on coping behavior. The first report discusses the steps involved in empirically determining…

The United States portion of a crossnational study of coping styles suggests that children may have coping strategies that support their value systems. Participants were two random samples of equal numbers of ten- and fourteen-year-olds, boys and girls, upper-middle class and upper-lower class in communities near Chicago, Illinois, and Austin,…

Coping skills and work motivation were investigated as predictors of academic achievement in Japan, West Germany, and Austin, Texas. Data were gathered from a sample of 3,600 ten and fourteen-year olds. Aptitude was measured by the Raven Progressive Matrices; achievement was measured by standardized tests in reading and mathematics, and by grade…

Patterns of sex and socioeconomic differences in aptitude and achievement were compared among eight countries. A universal pattern appeared in which higher status children scored better than lower status children in aptitude, achievement, and school grades. Peer reputation largely ran the same way, with mild exceptions. The social differences in…