Undergraduate Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Meaning-making is increasingly being studied as a form of adaptive coping with stress both theoretically and in applied contexts such as health, trauma and positive psychology. Its implications for intervention have also been noted (Henry... more

Meaning-making is increasingly being studied as a form of adaptive coping with stress both theoretically and in applied contexts such as health, trauma and positive psychology. Its implications for intervention have also been noted (Henry et al., 2010). However, questions about key components of the model, such as the role of meaning-making in automatically leading to meaning made, and the assumption that meaning made gives way to adaptive outcomes (see Bonanno, Papa, Lalande, Zhang, & Noll, 2005; Davis, Wortman, Lehman, & Silver, 2000), have been neither adequately explored nor answered. Most recently, meaning-making was also found to only partially mediate the relationship between belief and goal violations and individuals’ perceived change in their life philosophy (Lim, Park & Slattery, 2012), suggesting that factors other than meaning-making help to produce meaning made.

This study proposed that personal coping resources might mediate or moderate the relationship between meaning-making and meaning made, and took self-efficacy as one example. Self-efficacy has been found to be a separate, but related construct to meaning-making (van den Heuvel, Demerouti, Schreurs, Bakker, & Schaufeli, 2009). Although empirical comparisons of the two are limited, the expectancy-value theory (Bandura, 1995) suggests that self-efficacy would act as a motivational resource in guiding people to achieve a goal or aim.

Demographics: 280 undergraduates in a Singaporean university filled in a questionnaire that asked them to indicate a stressful event that had occurred recently. The majority of the sample was female (59%) and Chinese (85%); others identified as Indian (6%) and other ethnicity (9%). A majority (70%) affiliated themselves with a religion (34% Christianity, 19% Buddhism, 17% other faiths).

Measures: Participants answered questions about their worldview change after the event, meaning-making assessed through the Core Beliefs Inventory (CBI; Cann et al., 2010; used in Park, 2008) and their trait self-efficacy (Generalised Self-Efficacy Scale; Schwarzer & Jerusalem, 1995).

Results: Self-efficacy moderated the relation between meaning-making and meaning made, but only among individuals with similar levels of trait meaning-making. Among individuals with higher levels of trait meaning-making, the relationship between meaning-making and meaning made was strongest in the case of high self-efficacy, and weakest for low self-efficacy, reflecting our predictions. However, the opposite effect was observed for individuals with lower levels of trait meaning-making: meaning-making and meaning made were most strongly correlated when self-efficacy was low.

Discussion: We argue that: 1) the asymmetrical moderation effects of self-efficacy for individuals with different levels of trait meaning-making imply that meaning-making may also constitute a coping style, in addition to its being a process; 2) producing meaning may not necessarily be important, especially for individuals who score lower on trait meaning-making; 3) these results suggest that meaning-making has a controlled, cognitive character that could be further explored through metacognitive theories of rumination and worry (e.g. Watkins, 2004; Wells, 1995) in which individuals’ beliefs and appraisals about cognitive processes underlie pathological worry and repetitive thinking. Further research linking rumination and meaning-making may help to illuminate the elusive line between maladaptive and adaptive cognitive coping with stress and trauma.