Examining adolescents' sense of belonging and coping strategies

The research aims to determine adolescents' feelings of belonging to school and coping strategies. The study group consisted of 1214 students (738 girls, 476 boys) attending three different types of public schools under the Ministry of National Education in Lüleburgaz district of Kırklareli. In order to collect data, Sense of Belonging to School Scale, Coping Strategies Scale for Adolescents and Personal Information Form were used. SPSS 17.0 software was used for analysis. Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro Wilk normality tests were applied in order to determine whether the data obtained correspond to the normal distribution. The Kruskal Wallis Test; Mann-Whitney U Test was used to determine which dimensions stem from this difference in case of significant values in variance analysis. In order to look at the relational values between sense of belonging to the school, coping strategies and sub-dimensions, Spearman Rank Differences correlation analysis was used because the data was not distributed normally. The sense of belonging to the school variable consists of the dimensions of belonging to the school and sense of rejection. The coping strategies variable consists of active coping, avoiding coping and negative coping dimensions. As a result of the analyzes, it was found that there was a positive and medium level statistically significant relationship between the sense of belonging to the school dimension and active coping strategy. In the sense of belonging to school, it was observed that male students scored higher than female students. It was concluded that as the grade level increased, the scores of sense of belonging dimension decreased and the scores of sense of rejection dimension increased. It was observed that the school type science high school had the highest sense of belonging belonging to the school type, while the lowest school sense dimension scores belong to the vocational high school students. The highest scores in the sense of rejection dimension belong to vocational high school students, while the lowest rejection sense dimension scores belong to science high school students. In terms of perceived academic achievement, it was seen that the students who perceived their success to be high had high sense of belonging to school and low rejection points. It was concluded that the students who made high school choices with their families had high sense of belonging to the school and the students who made point-oriented choices had higher rejection points. Coping strategies did not show a significant difference according to gender. When coping strategies were examined according to grade level, it was found that the 10th grade students had higher scores in avoiding coping strategies, while there were no significant differences in active coping and negative coping strategies at the grade level. It was observed that science high school students had higher active coping strategy scores. It was concluded that the students who perceived high academic achievement had higher scores in active coping strategy and those who perceived low academic achievement had higher scores in negative coping strategy. As a result of the joint decision taken with the family during the high school selection process, it was determined that high school students had high scores in active coping strategy and points-oriented students had high scores in negative coping strategy. The findings were discussed within the framework of the literature.