COPING E SAÚDE MENTAL DE GRÁVIDAS ADOLESCENTES PARTICIPANTES DO PROJETO MENINAS DE LUZ

Abstract

This dissertation presents a research with pregnant adolescents aiming to evaluate the event pregnancy in adolescence, know the sample demographics, and verify the occurrence of correlations among stress, coping, anxiety, and depression due to pregnancy. Data were collected in Projeto Meninas de Luz, a social program dedicated to pregnant adolescents in Goiânia GO, a city in the Midwestern Region of Brazil, using a convenience sample (n = 43). This research was divided into two parts: Study 1 and Study 2. In order to carry out Study 1, an interview guide was built based on theoretical studies about the subject and applied to 11 of the participants to evaluate how they faced the event pregnancy. In Study 2, with all the participants, first, the Coping Response Inventory Youth Form (CRI-Y) was used in order to know the coping strategies the sample used to face the problem. After that, the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were applied aiming to evaluate the participants levels of anxiety and depression, respectively. ANOVA test was performed to analyze the means of coping, levels of anxiety and depression according to the age, and Spearman technique was applied to evaluate the correlations among the variables using Windows SPSS version 11.0. It was concluded that: the participants accepted pregnancy, although they continued to present the typical characteristics of adolescence; there was no pattern in the use of coping strategies; no differences in the use of coping strategies among ages were found; and the participants did not present psychopathological levels of anxiety and depression. These results might have been found due to the reduced number of participants.