Coping strategies among people with intellectual disability

For long it was thought that people with intellectual disabilities (ID) were not adversely affected by stress and therefore were not included in stress research. In this paper, the Spanish adaptation of the Coping Strategies Inventory (CSI) was applied to 262 adults aged between 20 and 74 years old, 108 with ID and 154 without ID from Burgos, Spain. People with ID showed significant aged-related differences in social support in relation to age, people over 40 scoring higher than people over 50. In the group of people without ID, women used more strategies focused on search for support (M= 15.05, SD = 6.21) and on emotion-release (M= 12.16, SD = 4.3) than men (M= 10.00, SD = 6.21; M= 8.29, SD = 5.26), but men resorted more to the social withdrawal strategy (M= 8.09, DT= 5.19) than women (M= 5.05, DT = 3.82). People with ID were found to use problem solving, cognitive restructuring, and social support strategies less frequently than people without ID.