Coping with stress by young people leaning towards young adult fiction

The paper reviews the concepts of youth subculture and neo-tribes. Young adult literature is regarded as an art movement and analyzed from a psychological perspective. The movement acts as a compensation for life experience unavailable for a modern adolescent in the real world that can lead to escapism as a behavioral strategy at an older age. The paper presents the results of an empirical study on coping strategies and hardiness of young people reading young adult books. The research employed the following methods: the partially standardized questionnaire, the Hardiness Survey by S. Maddi modified by Russian psychologists E.N. Osin and E.I. Rasskazova, and the Ways of Coping Questionnaire (WCQ) by R. Lazarus adapted by T.L. Kryukova, E.V. Kuftyak, and M.S. Zamyshlyaeva. The sample consisted of 124 people aged 20-30; the main and control groups were equalized by gender. The findings obtained were processed with the help of the descriptive statistic methods and Mann-Whitney U-test (SPSS 20.0). The research highlights the characteristics of coping strategies and hardiness of young people leaning towards young adult fiction. The paper reveals that the group under study prefers self-control and escapism and demonstrates the lack of involvement in life events. Besides, this group possesses a lower level of hardiness in comparison with others and is less often able to face the challenges.