Social Support and Stress: Experiences of Youth Coping with Challenging Life Events
A special issue of Youth (ISSN 2673-995X).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2025) | Viewed by 4053
Editors
Interests: adolescent development; emerging adulthood; stress; depression; suicide prevention; substance use; cross-cultural research on family dynamics
Interests: social and social-cognitive development; peer relationships; parent-youth relationships; the development and maintenance of aggressive behavior, harassment, and bullying
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Social support plays an important role in youth psychosocial adjustment and wellbeing. When confronted with challenging life events, social support becomes even more salient. This Special Issue of Youth aims to examine how social support, social connection, and/or social cognition contribute to youth’s resilience after experiencing a stressful or challenging life event. The issue will broadly define “challenging life event” as individual or family-level challenging events (e.g., parental divorce, death of a family member), as well as broadly experienced events such as COVID-19, natural disasters, or school shootings.
These issues are especially important to examine during the developmental stages of adolescence and emerging adulthood. When life-changing events occur, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or a wide-reaching flood, earthquake, or fire, planned trajectories of academic and career-development progress may be disrupted, and pre-existing social support networks may be dissolved. For example, the school shutdowns, online learning, social distancing, and mask mandates associated with COVID-19 all had a significant impact on how youth interacted with school, family, peers, close friends, and intimate partners. Thus, this Special Issue aims to examine how youth re-develop their social relations “post”-challenging life events and how social support, social connection, and/or social cognition contribute to their resilience in social functioning as protective factors. We are also interested in including research that focuses on prevention and/or intervention work aiming to combat any social challenges experienced by youth due to COVID-19 or another challenging life event.
Dr. Chih-Yuan Steven Lee
Prof. Dr. Sara Goldstein
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Youth is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- social support
- social connection
- social cognition
- stress
- life events
- COVID-19
- coping
- resilience
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