Abstract

This study examines stress, coping style, and life-satisfaction of Koreans living during national economic crisis. This research focuses on four following aspects: 1) compare stressful events, coping style, and life-satisfaction among primary, junior high, senior high school students, and their parents and also sex differences; 2) within student sample, comparison among educational level and sex and within adult sample comparison among different age of their children, are examined; 3) the effect of SES. self-efficacy, academic achievement, and delinquency on stress, coping style, and life-satisfaction are examined; and 4) the pattern of relationship between parents and children found for stress, coping, and life-satisfaction are examined A total of 983 students (primary school students=195, junior high school students=398, and senior high school students=309) and their fathers (employee=907, no response=76) and mothers (employee=362, housewife=481) participated in the study. The questionnaire included the following scales: self-efficacy, social support, stressful event, coping style, stress symptoms, life-satisfaction, academic or social achievement, and background information and scale measuring delinquent behavior was added to the students' questionnaire. All the scales showed adequate reliability. The results of the study are as follows. First, students experience greatest stress from academic pressure and adults experience greater stress from financial matters. Both students and adults were more likely to use self-regulating coping strategy, life-satisfaction was highest for family life. Second, for the student sample, academic and relational stress increased with grade level and life-satisfaction decreased. For adults, parent-child relational stress increased as their children's grade level increased and life-satisfaction for parent-child socialization and family life decreased and satisfaction for financial matters with increased. Adults were more likely to experience stress due to financial matters and of efficacy (parent-child relational efficacy, relational efficacy for friends, and self-regulatory learning) predicted higher life-satisfaction, and for adults relational efficacy for spouse and parent-child relational efficacy, and coping efficacy were highly correlated with life-satisfaction. Fourth, the life-satisfaction of the students were related to their parents' life-satisfaction, self-efficacy.