La recreación, habilidades sociales y estrategias de afrontamiento en adolescentes mexicanos durante la primera etapa del confinamiento por Covid-19

Abstract

The Mexican General Health Council in March 2020 recognized the SARS-CoV2 epidemic as serious and of priority attention, establishing preventive measures and calling for confinement. This paper focuses its attention on an adolescent population, who by nature are in search of mobilization outside the family and independence. The objective stated to analyze the relationship of recreational activity of Mexican adolescents during the first stage of COVID-19 confinement (March-July 2020) with handling social skills and coping strategies. The research design corresponds to the non-experimental empirical type; For the collection of information, an ad hoc questionnaire was designed that integrated three instruments: Questionnaire on recreation in adolescents in a situation of confinement, Validated Scale of Social Skills by its acronym EHS and Coping Scales for adolescents (ACS). Said instrument had a reliability of Cronbach's Alpha of α=.962 and a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin coefficient of .969. The selection of the sample was probabilistic, made up of 444 Mexican adolescents from the western zone between 12 and 17 years old, 57.4% women and 42.6% men. The main findings show positive relationships between social skills and coping strategies. Being recreational activities a social support resource that allowed effective coping during the pandemic. 88.1% of the students had enough free time to carry out recreational and physical-sports activities such as exercising or moving (67%), jogging (57.9%), training a sport (57.7%) and taking walks to the open air (50.7%). The most frequently performed recreational activities were listening to music, sleeping, and watching television. Likewise, it was found that women obtain better results than men in Social Skills; differences were found in the Search for Expert Support, with high school students being the ones who most resort to this measure and; finally, a positive association was found between the Coping Activities used by adolescents and Social Skills. This corroborates that the empowerment of adolescents in the positive and active use of leisure and recreation allows better coping and management of social skills, in other words, a mechanism for containment in a situation of youth crisis or social coexistence.