Cultural Coping with School Burnout: A 15-country Study

There has been increasing conceptual, theoretical, and empirical evidence pointing to culture’s impacts and consequences on the stress response and coping process for diverse racial, ethnic, and national groups (Kuo, 2011). However, as cultural coping research remains nascent, there is a scarcity of published coping studies that are grounded in established conceptual/theoretical basis, employ validated cultural coping measures, and base on truly cross-cultural/cross-national sample populations. The purpose of the present research is to test a model of cultural coping with school burnout among undergraduate university students in 15 countries: Canada, U.S., Brazil, Mainland China, Taiwan, Thailand, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Belarus, Germany, the Netherlands, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Specifically, the cultural coping behaviours of the participants were measured, in terms of Engagement Coping, Avoidance Coping, and Collective Coping as measured by the Cross-Cultural Coping Scale (CCCS: Kuo, Roysircar, & Newby-Clark, 2006). Model invariance testing will be conducted by: 1) testing the measurement invariance of the latent variables for both configural and metric invariance (Milsap & Olivera-Aguilar, 2012); and then 2) testing the structural invariance of the model through first evaluating a fully constrained model across all 15 countries and then assessing model fit. We hypothesize that a fully constrained model, which assumes strong structural invariance across all 15 countries, would likely not yield a good fit to the data. However, we will then systematically test the parameter estimates for each country against a model averaging the estimates of other countries. This assumes that the structural invariance is limited to differences in path estimates and not due to differences in structural organization. The stress-coping process is likely equivalent across the 15 countries, but the relative weighting of the different components within the model will likely differ. Research and practical implications of the study’s results will be discussed.