Coping strategies, stigmatizing attitude, and cyberbullying among Chinese college students during the COVID-19 lockdown

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic provides hotbed for hatred and violence, which could be especially true among college students, the most active users of internet and social media. Based on a national sample of Chinese college students (N = 1,673), the present study aims to explore the clustered nature of stress coping strategies, as well as its associations with the participants’ stigmatizing attitude and cyberbullying behaviors towards people in Hubei Province, the place where the first COVID-19 case was reported and recognized as China’s epicenter of the pandemic. Four latent subgroups were first identified among the participants based on type and comparative adoption rate of their coping strategies, namely the emotional coping group, the inactive coping group, the support-seeking and positive coping group, and the independent and positive coping group. The significant associations between coping strategy patterns and stigmatizing attitude and cyberbullying behaviors were reported, respectively. The two were most likely to happen among the participants using emotional coping while the least likely among the independent and positive coping group. This study provides empirical supports for combating the secondary disasters of the pandemic, namely stigma and cyberbullying, by identifying the role of emotional and positive coping strategies.