Emotion regulation and coping of young witnesses
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This study examined coping strategies in potential and previous young court witnesses in an attempt to address the present lack of attention to child witnesses within the coping literature, despite the consensus of opinion that many of these persons find their court appearance to be stressful. A sample of 30 court witnesses, ranging from 9-16 years of age (M = 13.28 years, ±2.09) and their primary caregivers independently completed an age-appropriate version of the 'Kidcope' (Spirito, Stark, & Williams, 1988) self-report coping questionnaire. Individual coping items were clustered by strategy type (e.g., Emotion-/Problem-Focused and Cognitively-/Behaviourally Based), with analyses focusing upon coping strategy usage, perceived effectiveness and other potentially impacting situational variables.
Study findings, discussed in the context of developmental theory, show age-related differences in the use of cognitively- and behaviourally-based coping strategies. Overall, a preference for the use of emotion-focused coping strategies, rather than problem-focused coping strategies, was found regardless of age. Furthermore, higher levels of agreement, concerning coping strategy usage and perceived effectiveness, are evident between the older (12-17 years) parent/caregiver-child dyads in this study and support for the sibling tutoring effect is also reported. This study highlights the need for further study in this area and provides a solid foundation on which the further investigation into the coping behaviours of young witnesses, and potential interventions, can be based.