So< So Med Vol 28. No 6, pp 621-624, 1989 0277s9536/89 $3 00 + 0 00 Prmted I” Great Bntan All nghts reserved Copynght 0 1989 Pergamon Press plc

COPING WITH POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN NORTHERN IRELAND

ED CAIRNS and RONNIE WILSON

Department of Psychology and Centre for the Study of Conflxt, Umversity of Ulster at Colerame, Colerame BT52 ISA. Northern Ireland

Abstract-Recent community based research, employing a self-assessed measure of psychologxal &tress, has suggested that people m Northern Ireland may be copmg relatively well with the stress of contmumg pohtlcal violence This paper reports a first chrect mvestigatlon of coping m Northern Ireland Using two scales from the Folkman and Lazarus Ways of Coping Questionnaire-Distancing and seeking Social Support-an attempt was made to investigate the role of coping in relation to local levels of violence, the appraisal of violence, gender and trait neutoticism The results indicated that trait neuroticism was not related to the appraisal of levels of violence, but that appraisal was related to both types of coping In partnxlar, those who perceived the violence to be more serious reported using less distancing, while they also reported seeking the most social support In addition more women reported seeking social support compared to men Finally those who lived m a high violence area were more likely to report usmg chstancmg than were those from a less violence prone area These results were taken to support the contentton that some form of demal may be the main form of coping m Northern Ireland, and that copmg 1s related more to the appraisal of violence than to actual violence levels, while the appraisal of violence IS m turn not related to trait neurotxlsm

Kek ~ords+opmg, stress, violence

INTRODUCTION

Over the last 20 years or so, whde the questlon of the impact of pohtlcal violence m Northern Ireland, on the psychological well-being of the people who hve there, has attracted a certain amount of attention, emplrlcal research has been limited (see Ref [I] for a review) The research, that has been carried out, can largely be dlvlded mto two types First came research which involved the exammatlon of mformatlon contained m admission and referral rates and/or psychotropic drug usage, and (more recently) com- munity based studies which have administered a standardized measure of psychological distress-the General Health Qestlonnalre-to random samples of the population

These two types of research, carried out largely at different periods of time and using very different approaches, have come to somewhat differing con- clusions The earlier research presented a rather confused pattern of results suggestmg, at times, that the violence has had no effect on psychological well-being, that it has Increased psychlatnc morbld- lty, or even that it has led to a decrease m psychlatrlc morbldlty On the other hand, the research which has adopted a community based approach has suggested that, while the ‘troubles’ are playing some sort of role m adding to the stresses of everyday life m Northern Ireland, their contrlbutlon 1s probably only a relatively small one

Using a commumty based approach, Calms and Wilson [2] have tentatively concluded that it 1s not actual levels of violence that are the primary source of stress where the troubles are concerned, but rather it IS the way m which people perceive that violence In other words, it 1s ‘appraisal’ of threat that 1s important where stress 1s concerned, not the obJective

level of threat as measured by some cnterlon outside the person Further, they also concluded that ap- pralsal of the seriousness of polrtlcal violence 1s a cause of increased psychological distress, as measured by the General Health Questionnaire [3] and not vice versa This 1s important because one posslblhty 1s that those m the population who are more emotional (that 1s high m trait neuroticism) are more hkely to view the violence as more serious Psychological distress as measured by the GHQ 1s not, of course, a measure of trait neurotlclsm, although it 1s thought that the two are related

Secondly, they have suggested that, given the high levels of unemployment and relative poverty m Northern Ireland, plus the violence, people m Northern Ireland must have developed some sort of strategy for mmlmlzmg the impact of these stressors In other words, people m Northern Ireland must be coping effectively Further they have hypothesized that denial may be the major coping mechanism involved This conclusion was reached as a result of a study m which two towns with contrastmg levels of actual pohtlcal valence (Hightown and Lowtown) were compared The results of this study suggested that denial might be particularly prevalent m the high violence town [2]

AsIde from this suggestion by Cairns and Wilson [2], no research has been directed at the topics of appraisal of violence and coping with the stress of pohtlcal violence in Northern Ireland There has been however, a certain amount of speculation regarding coping m Northern Ireland, and, to date, the two favourlte candidates are habituation and social sup- port The first suggests that, m effect, people m Northern Ireland have become used to the violence, while the second stresses the close knit nature of families m Northern Irish society and suggests

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622 ED CAIRNS and RONNIE WILSON

that this IS the mam protective mechanism for the Northern Irish people The general aim of this study, therefore, was to look more closely at these questions More specifically, it examined coping m relation to the pohtlcal violence m Northern Ireland using the approach of Lazarus and Folkman [4], and went on to examme the relationship between the appraisal of violence, coping with violence and trait neurotlclsm

Given that, m the study noted above, It has been suggested that the population of Hightown were utlhzmg denial to a greater extent than that m Lowtown, the hypothesis was that location and ap- praisal would influence both amount and type of coping with more denial m the high violence town and overall, more reporting of denial by those who reported less violence No specific hypotheses were entertained concerning social support other than that, overall, people would report using this form of coping more than they reported using denial Finally trait neurotlclsm was expected to be unrelated to either the appraisal of violence or coping per se

METHOD

Subjects and procedures

Questionnaires were admmlstered to a quota sample of 430 adults over 18 years, contammg equal numbers of men and women, and of over 40 years and under 40 years m two towns m Northern Ireland These two towns were comparable m demographic terms except that they had suffered high and low levels of pohtlcal violence respectively [2] All the interviews were carried out on the streets of these towns on the same Saturday m March 1987 by undergraduate psychology students

Questlonnazre

The questlonnalre conslsted of (among other things) 12 questions from the Revised Ways of Coping Questlonnalre designed for community use by Lazarus and his colleagues [5], eight questions measuring trait neuroticism [6], a question asking how serious the violence had been m the town m the last 3 months (none, a little, some, a lot) plus a series of demographic questions

The Ways of Copmg Questtonnawe

The Revised Ways of Coping Questionnaire con- sists of eight scales, each measured by about SIX items For this prehmmary mvestlgatlon we decided to look Just at those ways of coping that had at least face validity where the violence m Northern Ireland 1s concerned Therefore we choose four Items to measure each of Distancing and Seeking Social Support These It would appear are the scales which come closest to measuring denial and the use of social support-two of the copmg mechanisms which have already been identified as possibly being used m Northern Ireland to deal with pohtlcal violence It must be added of course that the use of the distancing scale, which would appear to tap a relatively con- sclous coping mechanism to measure denial, a rather more unconscious defense mechanism, IS problem- atlc However, given the present ‘state of the art’ m this area this IS the best approach to the problem that the authors could find

Table I Sample characterlstxs for each town

HIghtown Lowtown

N 191 239 Mean age 36 9 38 8 % Women 51 3 50 6 % Unemployed 30 2 I6 7

These Ways of Coping questions were introduced by first asking the respondent to think of the ‘last serious incident that happened here’ and to state what that incident was Each person was then asked when the incident happened, and to what extent, for example, they ‘made light of the sltuatlon’ (a dlstanc- mg item), to which they had to respond on a four- point scale-‘Not at all’, ‘Somewhat’, ‘Quite a bit’ or ‘A great deal’ The maximum score for each coping scale was 16

The Trart Neurotrclsm Questzonnawe

This questlonnalre consisted of eight items measur- mg trait neuroticism chosen from the 12 neuroticism Items of the Short-scale EPQ-R [6], usmg a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ response format (maximum 8)

RESULTS

The sample

Table 1 displays some mformatlon about the achieved sample m each town This shows that rather more mtervlews were completed m Lowtown How- ever, m terms of age and proportion of women m the sample, the two groups are relatively similar The sample from Hightown however contained more unemployed (a known characteristic of Hightown)

The last serzous rncldent

The most frequently mentioned mcldent was an explosion of some sort which was reported by 57% of the participants A sizeable mmorlty (19%) also mentioned a shooting Incident (the maJonty of whom, 78% were residents of Hightown) The re- mainder of the violent Incidents reported Included bombscares (3%), nets/protests (6%) and mtlml- datlon (1%) Just under 5% of those questioned said they could not remember the precise nature of the last violent incident The maJorlty (57%) of these people came from Lowtown

Perception of uolence

With this scale reduced to three points, ‘No VIO- lence’, ‘A little’ and ‘Some/a lot’ (see Table 2) It IS

clear that more people m Hightown felt that there had been ‘Some/a lot’ of violence m their town compared to those from Lowtown and an X*-test revealed that this difference was statistically slgmficant (X2 = 92 7, df = 2, P < 0 001)

Table 2 Perceptmn of wolence levels m both towns

None A httle Some/a lot

HIghtown 8% 18% 14% Lowtown 14% 59% 21% Total 11% 41% 48%

Copmg with pohtlcal violence in Northern Ireland 623

Tract Neurotlctrm

There was no difference between the samples from the two towns m terms of trait neurotlasm, Hlghtown 3 45 (2 32) and Lowtown 3 32 (2 21) Further, trait neurotlclsm was not related to the perceptlon of violence m either Hlghtown (r = 0 07) or Lowtown (r = 0 03) However, while, as predicted, m Lowtown trait neurotlclsm was not related to use of distancing (0 01) or social support (-0 03), there was a very modest, but statlstlcally significant, re- latlonshlp between one of these measures (dlstancmg 0 12) and trait neurotlclsm m Hlghtown

Ways of Copmg Questzonnatre

Evidence that the Ways of Copmg Questlonnalre was Indeed medsurmg two different methods of cop- mg 1s provided by the correlation between the two scales of the coping questionnaire (-0 09), which mdlcates that the Distancing and Seeking Social Support scales were unrelated as claimed by Folkman et al [5]

Overall the people who took part m the present study reported using dlstancmg more (X = 8 55, SD = 2 39) than they used seekmg social support (X = 6 63, SD= 2 33) However, as noted above, earlier research has indicated that both location and appraisal may influence copmg The next step therefore was to carry out, for each coping scale a two-way analysis of covanance, Locatlon (Hlghtown, Lowtown) by Perceived Violence (now collapsed to a two-pomt scale, None/a httle vs Some/a lot) with trait neurotlclsm as a covarlate The results of this were as follows

hstanczng There was a mam effect of distancing (F = 7 86, df = 1420, P < 0 01) which indicated that people m Hlghtown reported that they used this form of copmg (8 90) more often than did people m Lowtown (8 33) Secondly, there was a mam effect for perceived violence or appraisal (F = 5 89, df = 1420, P < 0 05), such that those who reported that the violence was at the highest levels (m each town) also reported that they used distancing less compared to those who felt there was ‘A little’ or ‘No’ violence at all (Table 3)

Seeking soczal support Here there was only a mam effect for perceived violence (F = 18 77, df = 1420, P < 0 001) This time those, who had the worst view of the violence, reported that they used social support the most compared to those who perceived ‘A httle’ or ‘No’ violence

DISCLJSSION

The perception of violence results (Table 2) re- inforce once agam the choice of Hlghtown and Lowtown as towns with contrasting levels of violence, and Indicate that this view 1s one shared by the residents of the towns themselves What 1s also

Table 3 Mean cmopmg scores sit each level of percened vmlence

Percewed wolence level _ Copmg scale (ma,. = 16) None/a bttle Some/a lot

Dlstancmg 8 85 8 32 Seekmg soaal support 621 7 06

interesting 1s that this time, compared to 4 years earher [2], perceptions of violence have apparently changed In 1983 some 27% of the residents of Hlghtown and nearly 42% of those m Lowtown claimed there was no violence compared with 8% and 14% respectively m 1987 What appears to have happened 1s that respondents have moved up the scale one pomt m terms of modal response which for Hlghtown was ‘A little’ (58%) m 1984 and 1s now ‘Some/a lot’ (74%) Slmllarlly m Lowtown the modal response was ‘none’ (42%) 4 years ago and 1s now ‘some’ (57%) These changes are no doubt related to differences m levels of pohtlcal violence with much greater levels of violence m 1987 This 1s dlustrated m the number of lives lost due to pohtlcal violence m the whole of Northern Ireland-a total of 63 m 1984 and 93 m 1987 This m turn has lmphcatlons for the present study, because it means that people were being asked to think about their reactions to violent incidents at a time when, even by Northern Irish standards, violence was a relatively novel event

The results noted above also appear to confirm the assertion by Cairns and Wilson [2] that trait neurotlc- lsm 1s not related to the way m which people perceive the severity of the violence This m turn makes it unlikely that their finding that stress and the per- ception of violence are related IS due to the operation of a third common factor-trait neuroticism Fur- ther, It 1s mterestmg to note that if one extrapolates from the present means (based on eight questlons) to what would have been obtamed if all 12 questions had been asked, as m the orlgmal study, then the overall mean for the present study would have been 5 07 which IS remarkably close to the 5 90 obtamed by Eysenck et al [6] m then study

Rather more surprlsmg 1s the fact that a modest but significant correlation was found between one of the coping measures and trait neuroticism and that this occurred only m the Hlghtown sample One possible explanation for this IS that this 1s due to the operation of some weak person x sltuatlon mter- actton, such that, m situations where violence IS particularly rife, more neurotic people are more likely to use this copmg strategy rather more often

More predictable was the mam effect for the town on the distancing scale showing that more dlstancmg IS involved m dealing with violent mcldents m Hlghtown than m Lowtown, but that m both towns the trend 1s for more distancing to be utlhzed by those who perceive the violence to be less serious If one accepts that dlstancmg may be measurmg a form of denial then this strongly supports the interpretation Cairns and Wilson [2] place upon their results

One way to interpret these results 1s to suggest that m areas where actual violence 1s more common there 1s a greater need to use distancing to cope with it However the data also suggest that, regardless of local area violence levels, the more one uses dls- tancmg the less violence one perceives m one’s own area This latter statement of course suggests a cause and effect relatlonshlp, with dlstancmg Influencing the way violence levels are perceived It IS of course lmposslble to disentangle cause and effect m a cross-sectional study such as this Nevertheless It 1s plausible to speculate that the distancing precedes the perceptlon of violence levels This suggestion

624 ED CAIRNS and RONNIE WILSON

becomes particularly evident when one exammes the actual questions on the dlstancmg scale, for example, ‘Make light of the situation’ or ‘Go on as if nothing happened’ It follows that people who behave m this way would m turn tend to underestimate the levels of violence m their nelghbourhood Further this mter- pretatlon of the present results 1s m accord with the Folkman and Lazarus [7] classdicatton of distancing as a coping mechanism which changes the “subjective meaning or significance of a person*nvironment transaction”, and which depends on dlstortlon of reality via selective attention or interpretation

Northern Ireland tends to pride itself as being a place where family relattonshlps are close As noted above this has been sometimes given as one of the reasons that people there have been able to withstand the various hardships that they have had to endure over the last 20 years The fact that social support did not figure as the most important coping strategy ~111 therefore come as something of a surprise to Northern Irish readers One possible interpretation of the seeking social support result, m relation to the distancing results, 1s that those who seek most social support are those who employ the least distancing This m turn could account for the fact that those who seek most social support are those who tend to perceive the violence to be at Its worst

Ireland perceive the level of violence m their nelgh- bourhood IS an important vanable, and one which 1s not simply the result of generalized emotional re- sponse to stress Further this study also reinforces the suggestion that a denial-like coping processdls- tancmg-may be one of the strategies people m Northern Ireland are using to deal with the stress related to pohtlcal violence and that it IS distancing rather than emotlonahty that influences perception of violence levels Perhaps this 1s not so surprlsmg, because, as Folkman and Lazarus [7] have pointed out, distancing may be particularly adaptive m sltu- atlons where nothing concrete can actually be done A description which, we suspect, all too well fits the situation m Northern Ireland as seen by the people who hve there

Obviously the present study has only begun to scratch the surface regardmg the whole question of copmg with violence m Northern Ireland and m particular, as noted above, the question of cause and effect remains Further the cross-sectional design employed here does not do Justice to the dynamic nature of coping as envisaged by Lazarus and others Nevertheless, it 1s possible to reach the tentative concluston that this study has added to the growing evidence that the way m which people m Northern

Calms E and Wdson R Psychlatrlc aspects of violence m Northern Ireland Stress Med 1, 193-201 1985 Calms E and Wdson R The Impact of pohtlcal VIO- lence on mild psychlatrx morbldlty m Northern Ireland Br J Psychraf 145, 631-635, 1984 Goldberg D Manual of the General Health Question- nawe NFER-Nelson, Windsor, 1978 Lazarus A and Folkman R Stress, Apprarsal and Copmg Springer, New York, 1984 Folkman S , Lazarus A , Dunkel-Schetter C , DeLongls A and Gruen R The dynamics of a stressful encounter congltlve appraisal, copmg, and encounter outcomes J Person sot Pychol 50, 992-1003, 1986 Eysenck S B G , Eysenck H and Barrett P A revised version of the psychotlclsm scale Person Indmrd Dtff 6, 21-29, 1985 Folkman S and Lazarus R S The relatlonshlp between copmg and emotion lmphcatlons for theory and re- search SOL Scr Med 26, 309-317, 1988

REFERENCES