The Influences of Spiritual Well-Being, Parental Rearing Attitude, and Coping Strategies on USA College Students' Anxiety and Depression

Purpose:  The purpose of this study was to exam the relationships between college student’s spiritual well-being, parental rearing attitude, and coping strategies with their anxiety and depression. 

 Methods:  There were 330 college students recruited from a state university in the central USA including 79 male (23.9%) and 251 female (76.1%). The mean age was 25.20 (SD = 6.83). The data were collected by structured questionnaires. The SPSS 20 was used to do the data analysis.

Results: The statistical significant factors related to Anxiety include Spiritual well-being (r = -0.262, p ≤ 0.001),  Positive Parental Rearing Attitude including Inductive Reasoning (r =-0.16 , p ≤ 0.01), Communication (r = -0.154, p ≤ 0.01), and Involvement (r = -0.132, p ≤ 0.05) as well as Negative Parental Rearing Attitude (r = 0.22, p ≤ 0.001) including Inconsistent  Discipline (r = 0.18, p ≤ 0.001) and Harsh Discipline (r = 0.163, p ≤ 0.01). Coping strategies including Problem Focused Disengagement (r = -0.316, p ≤ 0.001), Emotion Focused Engagement (r = 0.29, p ≤ 0.001), and Emotion Focused Disengagement (r = 0.304, p ≤ 0.001) had significant relationships with college students’ anxiety. Same as Anxiety, Depression had significant relationships with those variables. Depression also had a significant relationship with Positive Parental Rearing Attitude (r = -0.164, p ≤ 0.01). 

 Conclusion: Increasing the scores of Spiritual well-being, Positive Parental Rearing Attitude, and using Problem Focused Disengagement coping strategies decreased college students’ Anxiety and Depression. Decreasing scores of Negative Parental Rearing Attitude and emotional coping strategies also decreased college students’ Anxiety and Depression.