Review
"Children's Stress and Coping: A Family Perspective, by Dr. Elaine Sorensen, is a significant contribution to the literature. This work represents not merely a review, but a scholarly critique of the empirical and theoretical work in the area of stress and coping in children.
"The family perspective of children is exemplified by Sorensen's description of her own qualitative study of children's daily stressors and coping behavior. The importance of the child as an informant in family research is asserted in the introductory chapters and confirmed by the report of her own research. This book is essential reading for all professionals who care about children." --Nancy M. Ryan-Wenger, Ph.D., R.N., Ohio State University
"Elaine Sorensen's timely, cogent, and stimulating book carefully weaves together concepts and methods from several disciplines to create a holistic picture of how children actually cope with the stresses and strains of daily life. A great strength is the clear illustration of qualitative, developmentally appropriate research methods with school-aged children. Because of its scope and breadth, this book will be very useful to theorists, researchers, and practitioners who are interested in stress in children and families." --David C. Dollahite, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Family Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Practicing Marriage and Family Therapist
"Children's Stress and Coping, by Elaine Shaw Sorensen, is a unique and creative book. It is unique in that it crosses disciplinary boundaries and barriers, combining a clinical sensitivity from pediatric nursing (the author's disciplinary background) with a scholarly view of stress, coping, and family research. Her book begins with three chapters that thoroughly review stress literatures, focusing on family stress and coping, and being particularly attentive to children's experiences within their families. The bibliography lists 26 pages of classic and current references that form the conceptual foundation for her own original research, presented in chapters 4 and 5.
The most fascinating aspect of Sorensen's book is her own study of children's stress and coping; it is not just about children (from the viewpoint of adults) but from children themselves, reflecting their own subjective perspectives. Over 1200 daily diary responses provide rich qualitative insights through the eyes of children about their daily hassles, their endurance, and their uplifts. Parallel data from parent surveys, coded and content analyzed later, allowed Sorensen to contrast child and parent views. The data that I find most intriguing are the gender and parent-child differences in perceptions of children's daily stressors, coping efforts, and resources. Boys' and girls' perceptions of everyday situations and themselves differ in interesting ways. Similarly, parents and children differ, and parents apparently have some remarkable blind spots about their children's perceptions. In terms of coping and adaptation, for example, parents are about three times as likely to report child crying, pouting, and complaining, but parents report none of the intrapsychic child responses that children do, such as feeling sad or rethinking the hassles of the day. It is almost as though parents missed children's inner responses entirely, while attending to their outward manipulation and behavior.
This descriptive-exploratory study builds up to a particularly useful taxonomy of stressors, coping responses, and resources that are salient to children as compared to their parents. A separate chapter presents children's drawings as an optional way of expressing their perceptions about the day. While interesting in their own right, over 70% of the drawings were coded as not seeming to be directly related to the stress-coping experiences reported by children.
This book will be extremely interesting to diverse professionals interested in family stress and coping, especially as these experiences involve children. In particular, applied professionals who try to help and understand children and their parents will find provocative insights in this book." --Brent Miller, Utah State University
About the Author
Elaine Shaw Sorensen is Associate Professor of Nursing at Brigham Young University. She has worked in education and clinical practice in maternal-child health and community nursing, including service for 18 months in Colombia. She does research on children's stress and coping, emphasizing the child's perspective in families and qualitative designs. Her other publications include scholarly and lay works on children, health, historical methods, and women's issues.
