Coping Skills during COVID-19 Among an Indigenous Community

Background/Purpose: Limited pandemic research indicates that religious beliefs, experiences of discrimination, gender, and subjects’ self-rating of health have statistically significant impacts on positive coping strategies. However, there is less research on the risk and protective factors that impacted coping strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to identify demographic, psychosocial, and clinical factors that predict positive coping factors during COVID-19 for citizens of an Indigenous community in the southeastern US.

Methods: This community-engaged study uses interviewer-administered surveys collected at two time points through non-probability sampling strategies. Timepoint 1 (T1, n=61), collected from 2018-2019, began as a cross-sectional study and had to readjust at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. T2 (n=40) included additional survey questions on coping strategies related to the pandemic, which were collected virtually through Zoom, FaceTime, and phone methods. All participants were tribal citizens and had access to one of these virtual technologies. All data methods were co-developed with Tribal research partners and approved by the Tribal government, then approved by the lead author’s university institutional review board.

“Total Coping Strategies,” a continuous composite variable, was created from the Brief-COPE upon which were regressed: (1) gender, (2) self-rated health score, (3) religious experience of Creator, and (4) personal experience of discrimination, which prior research has indicated as salient factors in coping. Bivariate associations were evaluated with Pearson correlations and chi-square tests. Standard entry regression was utilized to identify which factors were most likely to predict positive coping strategies in the sample, individually or in combination. Power evaluations were sufficient for the study.

Results: Of the 40 respondents, none had a negative coping score, indicating that positive coping predominated. The final regression model accounted for 43.67% of the variance in coping skills (p≤0.001). Factors that significantly predicted positive coping were self-rated general health (p=0.004), discrimination (p=0.003), religious beliefs (p=0.047), and gender (p=0.013). The intercept was insignificant, indicating that other factors beyond those evaluated may contain further drivers of positive coping skills.

Conclusions/Implications: The study found that positive coping skills predominated among participants of this Indigenous community during COVID-19 and were influenced by gender, religious beliefs, experiences of discrimination, and self-rated general health. One potential reason could be that this community experiences repeated disasters and has built a level of resilience. However, the insignificance of the constant indicates that there may be undiscovered factors informing coping skills or that COVID-19 impacted this community differently than environmental disasters since they could remain in place and connect with land during the pandemic. Future research should evaluate these factors, given the importance of the disproportional impacts of pandemics and other disasters on marginalized and indigenous populations.

This study addresses critical gaps in Indigenous research and may provide useful information for practitioners working with Indigenous populations to build and maintain resilience. Findings from this study may encourage future interdisciplinary research comparing coping skills in pandemics and environmental disasters to concentrate resources on those who would most benefit.