Abstract
Examined relationships among social support, psychosocial competence, and adaptation to college in a sample of 357 African American, Asian American, Latino, and white college students. Social support and active coping were significant predictors of adaptation to college, whereas locus of control was not. However, there was an interaction between ethnicity and locus of control indicating that although internal African American, Latino, and white students had higher adaptation-to-college scores than external students, the opposite was true for Asian Americans. The relationships among social support, internality, and active coping were also explored. Satisfaction with social support and internality were positively related to active coping, but locus of control and social support were unrelated. Active coping and internality were significantly related to each other for all groups except for African Americans. Although most relationships were the same across groups, these findings call attention to the role of ethnicity as a moderator of college adjustment processes.
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The authors gratefully acknowledge Carol Reisen and Philip Wirtz for their statistical expertise and help in analyzing the data. Sincere appreciation is expressed to all the students who participated in this study, as well as to the research team that collected and coded the data, Juliet Kurchin and Carla D'Aiello assisted in data preparation. The authors thank Faye Z. Belgrave, Dina Birman, Carol K. Sigelman, Edison J. Trickett, and four anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript.
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Zea, M.C., Jarama, S.L. & Bianchi, F.T. Social support and psychosocial competence: Explaining the adaptation to college of ethnically diverse students. Am J Commun Psychol 23, 509–531 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02506966
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02506966