Social Support

Life transitions, such as university attendance, entail the reconstruction of relations between the individual and the environment. This study aimed to explore how perceptions of social support changed across time during the first semester of university, and how social support, coping strategies, and adjustment were interrelated among 390 first-year students in Beijing, China. Results indicated that overall levels of social support among students did not change significantly across the first term, but that support from different sources (parents, peers, teachers, siblings) showed distinctive patterns of change. Support was positively related to adjustment and to coping skills in a dynamic way, and an integrative structural equations model showed that the role of social support operated both directly in relation to adjustment and indirectly through its relations to coping styles. These findings were related both to previous research on the transition to university in the West and to unique factors within the Chinese context.