Understanding adolescent stress and coping: mapping vulnerability and resilience

Adolescence is a time of dramatic personal and social development that holds powerful implications for future life outcomes. The combination of personal daily hassles and major life event stress can feel chaotic, confusing, and uncontrollable for adolescents even at the most stable of times. Today’s children and youth are experiencing these stressors whilst amid monumental social change: environmental and health crises, technological shifts such as artificial intelligence (AI) changing education and work environments, and rising income inequality just being a few.

Successfully negotiating both known stressors and change can require advanced coping skills that may push many adolescents' capacity to the limit. Added to this, adults within their main social settings - family and school – can struggle to support them, especially when their own experiences of being an adolescent were so different.

Professor Melanie Zimmer-Gembeck and her colleagues look to map the layers of stress and related coping skills. They provide theoretical frameworks and measures that can be translated into resources and programs to support children, adolescents, and their communities. While stress and coping theory has a history dating back more than 50 years, this work has tended to be based on adult models and has not considered how we learn, integrate, and organise our ways of coping with stress beginning in infancy and progressing through to adulthood.

Professor Zimmer-Gembeck’s extensive theory development has covered areas including the importance of social relationships (online or offline), major concerns of adolescents (body image, social media, technology, parents and friends), how intimate relationships, sexuality, identity and autonomy develop, and the impacts of offline and social media rejection experiences, aggression and abuse. This work has covered both positive (e.g., engagement, connections) and negative (e.g., withdrawal, isolation) aspects associated with stress and coping.

This knowledge building has led to consolidated theory on the multi-level aspects of stress, physiology, and coping and how these change with age. The creation of this substantial body of work has in turn led to the ongoing translation of the research into community benefit, including the delivery of the Family Interaction Program (FIP).

Directed by Professor Zimmer-Gembeck and based at Griffith University’s Gold Coast campus, FIP is a community integrated service that provides critical support for vulnerable families and children. It also acts as a source of evidence on the effectiveness of parenting support programs such as Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, PC-Care, and Circle of Security.

Established in 2002, FIP was funded as part of a competitive grant round delivered by the Department of Families, Seniors, Disability Services and Child Safety (Queensland Government, Australia) and is the only one of the 20 programs originally selected to go on to be continuously funded by the Department. FIP has received around $12 million in funding over the years and was recently re-funded until 2028.

FIP offers different models of care depending on the need, with all services incorporating research to empower families through evidence-based parenting and child behavioural interventions. This is matched with continuous evaluation of the program including on service satisfaction. In the past 20 years, approximately 1,250 families have progressed through FIP.

“They helped me realise that my struggles were real and not just in my head. I don’t feel like a bad person anymore. I feel more in control and in my situation, it is the best thing. I am more confident and stable now,” said a parent/guardian after participating in FIP.

The ongoing relationship between FIP and the Department of Families, Seniors, Disability Services and Child Safety has been critical in connecting with vulnerable children and their families and providing a service in line with the goals of the Department.

“You're providing the environment to collect the information that allows psychologists and other workers to provide a quality service. That's how we collectively help children and their families,” said Professor Zimmer-Gembeck, who as the Director of FIP focuses her time on the research components and structure of the program.

The program also provides an environment to train exceptional therapists with up-to-date evidence-based interventions. Around 50 clinical masters students and 29 PhD candidates have worked at FIP over the years.

As a developmental psychologist, Professor Zimmer-Gembeck looks at change over time using longitudinal research. For example, by using surveys, one study has followed young people from age 10 who are now around 24 years of age. Professor Zimmer-Gembeck and her colleagues also employ strategies such as daily diary studies and experiments that explore how children respond to randomly assigned conditions, and observational work to investigate, for example, how parents and children interact. Data collection occurs across multiple respondents (e.g., self-, teacher-, parent-, and peer-reported), providing a data rich map of the layers of stress and related coping skills amongst children and adolescents.

This valuable data collection has allowed Professor Zimmer-Gembeck and her colleagues to determine how to best measure stress appraisals, ways of coping, coping flexibility, parent-adolescent interactions, problem behaviour (e.g., aggression), emotion reactivity and regulation, and other topics.  These measures have been utilised by researchers around the world, with some having been translated into multiple other languages.

“I have been following [Professor Zimmer-Gembeck's] extensive work on adolescent development and social media with great interest. I would love to use the Social Media Appearance Preoccupation Scale (SMAPS) in my research after translating it into Turkish," said one researcher in feedback via email correspondance.

Professor Zimmer-Gembeck’s research is broadly used by governments, intergovernmental organisations, and Think Tanks, among others, with her academic publications having been referenced in almost 250 policy documents nationally and internationally.* The global impact of Professor Zimmer-Gembeck’s research is evident in that 93% of these policy documents are international, originating from organisations like the OECD, the World Health Organisation and agencies in more than 30 countries. The diversity of these policy documents indicates the broad range of topics that draw on understanding adolescence stress and mental health, including preventing youth offending, parenting interventions, social media/digital world, sexual health and risk, substance use, disability and behaviour support, abuse and violence reduction, self-harm, happiness and well-being, and teaching and education.

Next, Professor Zimmer-Gembeck is looking to increase understanding of how world transforming events shape adolescents’ coping, vulnerability, and resilience in everyday life. Ongoing, Professor Zimmer-Gembeck’s research will continue to build knowledge and consolidate this information into developmentally friendly theories and measures that facilitate translation into benefits for youth, families, and societies.