Coping strategies moderate the relationship between self efficacy and resilience among LGBTQ youth

Abstract

Mental health problems are disproportionately experienced by LGBTQ youth because of social marginalisation and minority stress. Although self-efficacy has been determined as a predictor of resilience, its mechanisms by which the two relate have not been studied extensively. This paper focuses on how coping strategies moderate the association between self-efficacy and resilience among the LGBTQ youth. To analyze the moderating effect of coping strategies on the self-efficacy and resilience relationship among LGBTQ youth. It was a cross-sectional study involving 405 youth participants of LGBTQ. The data were processed with the help of the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS 4. The moderation model tested self efficacy as the independent variable, resilience as the dependent variable and the moderator as the coping strategies. Five thousand resamples of bootstrapping were used to test the significance of path coefficients. The findings validated that coping strategies played an important role in moderating the relationship between self-efficacy and resilience. The positive association between self-efficacy and resilience was significant (β = 0.614, t = 19.225, p  < 0.001). The direct positive effect was observed between coping strategies and resilience ( β = 0.163, t = 2.391, p  = 0.017). The interaction term (Coping Strategies × Self-Efficacy) did not reach statistical significance (β = 0.237, t = 2.221, p  = 0.026, 95% CI [-0.012, 0.326]), with the confidence interval including zero. The model accounted 48.4% of the resilience variance (R 2 = 0.484). The analysis of conditional effects indicated that the effect of self-efficacy on resilience level intensified with the level of coping strategies with the effect of 0.377 at low level of coping, 0.614 at mean level of coping and 0.850 at high level of coping. The research offers an empirical evidence to support the fact that coping strategies strengthen the positive association between self-efficacy and resilience in the LGBTQ youth. The mentioned findings emphasise the necessity of building interventions that can support self-efficacy and adaptive coping to enhance resilience among this vulnerable group of people.