Resilience And Coping Strategies Among Internally Displaced Persons In Benue State

Abstract

The role of maladaptive coping strategies in problems such as anxiety, sleep disturbances, alcohol addiction, mental health problems, poor performance has been well reported in the literature. Resilience has also shown to mitigate the effect of maladaptive coping among various populations. However, the influence of resilience on coping strategies among Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Benue State is not well understood. Therefore, the interest of the study was to investigate such influence given the stated sample. The study adopted the ex-post facto survey design in which 399 IDPs, comprising 156(39.1%) males and 243(60.9%) females, whose ages ranged from 18 – 69 (Mean age = 32.03, SD=15.34) served as participants. The Brief Resilience Scale and the Coping Scale were used in data collection, while data analysis involved the use of Simple Linear Regression. Findings showed that, resilience had a significant positive influence on coping strategies. Resilience also explained 41.5% of the variance observed in coping strategies among the IDPs. Results also indicated that, resilience had a significant positive influence on cognitive coping, while a significant negative influence of resilience was found on emotional coping and behavioural coping strategies. The study recommended that resilience training should be introduced in IDP camps, to facilitate adaptive coping among the Internally Displaced Persons.