Abstract

This study, carried out on a group of 1278 Italian high school students (14-17 years old), aimed to deepen the adolescents' most frequent stress situations, their coping strategies, their characteristics of resiliency and the level of psycho-social adjustment, expressed by internalising and externalising problems. To this purpose we used three questionnaires, one for coping strategies (CSI, Amirkam, 1990), one for Ego-Resiliency (Block and Kremen, 1996; Caprara et al., 2003) and one for psycho-social symptoms (Achenbach, 1991). Results highlighted a prevalence of romantic and school problems and the presence of some differences related to type of school and gender. A relevant relationship was found between the most effective coping strategies (problem solving and support seeking) and the characteristics of resiliency of the subjects. Besides, the avoidance coping style and low level of resiliency are significantly related to both internalising and externalising symptoms.