Coping Skills May Amplify How Self-Efficacy Builds Resilience in LGBTQ Youth

Young people who identify as LGBTQ face a mental health landscape that remains measurably harsher than the one their peers navigate. Decades of research have linked social marginalisation and the chronic, cumulative stress that accompanies it to elevated rates of anxiety, depression and psychological distress among sexual and gender minority youth. Yet the picture is not uniformly bleak: many LGBTQ young people nonetheless thrive, adapt and recover from adversity, displaying a psychological capacity that scientists call resilience. Understanding what fuels that capacity has become one of the most pressing questions in developmental and community psychology, because the answer points directly toward interventions that could be built, tested and scaled. A new cross-sectional study published in Discover Psychology adds a carefully quantified piece to that puzzle, examining how belief in one’s own abilities and the strategies people use to cope with stress jointly shape resilience in a sample of 405 LGBTQ youth.

The study, conducted by Kashish Dua and Kanupriya Misra Bakhru of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Jaypee Institute of Information Technology in Noida, India, set out to test a specific statistical proposition: that coping strategies moderate, or condition, the strength of the relationship between self-efficacy and resilience. Self-efficacy, a concept rooted in Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory, refers to a person’s belief in their capacity to execute the behaviours required to produce desired outcomes. Resilience, meanwhile, is typically understood as the process and outcome of adapting well to difficulty. Prior work had already established self-efficacy as a predictor of resilience, but the mechanisms that govern how strongly that prediction holds, and for whom, had not been examined extensively in this population. The researchers hypothesised that the link would not be fixed but would instead flex depending on how the young people coped.

Methodologically, the team recruited 405 LGBTQ youth and collected cross-sectional data, meaning all measures were captured at a single point in time rather than tracked longitudinally. The analysis was carried out using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling, or PLS-SEM, implemented in SmartPLS 4. PLS-SEM is a variance-based approach to structural equation modelling that is particularly useful when models include latent constructs, such as self-efficacy or resilience, that cannot be observed directly and must instead be inferred from multiple survey indicators. In the specified model, self-efficacy served as the independent variable, resilience as the dependent variable, and coping strategies as the moderator whose interaction with self-efficacy was the central test. To establish whether the estimated path coefficients were statistically reliable, the researchers employed bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples, a resampling technique that repeatedly re-estimates the model on random subsamples of the data to generate confidence intervals and significance tests for each path.

The headline result was a robust positive association between self-efficacy and resilience. The path coefficient came in at 0.614, with a t-statistic of 19.225 and a p-value below 0.001, indicating that young people who reported stronger beliefs in their own capabilities also reported markedly higher resilience. In structural equation modelling terms, a coefficient of this size is substantial: it suggests that self-efficacy is not a marginal contributor but one of the dominant psychological correlates of resilience in this sample. Coping strategies also showed a direct positive effect on resilience, with a coefficient of 0.163, a t-statistic of 2.391 and a p-value of 0.017, meaning that the mere presence of coping resources, independent of self-efficacy, was associated with better adaptive outcomes.

The moderation test itself produced a more nuanced and, in places, statistically delicate picture. The interaction term combining coping strategies and self-efficacy yielded a coefficient of 0.237 with a t-statistic of 2.221 and a p-value of 0.026, which would conventionally be read as significant at the 0.05 level. However, the 95 percent confidence interval for that interaction ranged from -0.012 to 0.326, an interval that includes zero. In strict statistical terms, a confidence interval that crosses zero signals uncertainty about whether the true effect differs from no effect at all, and the authors’ abstract notes that the interaction term did not reach statistical significance on that criterion. This kind of tension between a p-value and a confidence interval is not unusual in moderation analyses, which typically require large samples and substantial measurement precision to detect interaction effects reliably, because interactions explain variance that main effects leave behind.

Where the analysis becomes genuinely compelling is in the conditional effects, which describe how the self-efficacy-to-resilience relationship changes across levels of coping. At low levels of coping strategies, the effect of self-efficacy on resilience was estimated at 0.377. At the mean level of coping, it rose to 0.614, and at high levels of coping it climbed to 0.850. Read together, these conditional estimates sketch a dose-response pattern: the more coping resources a young person commands, the more their confidence in their own abilities appears to translate into resilience. In practical terms, self-efficacy is never wasted, but it appears to work harder in the presence of adaptive coping, as though the two psychological resources operate in tandem rather than in isolation.

Overall, the full model accounted for 48.4 percent of the variance in resilience, an R-squared value that is notably high for research in this domain. Roughly half of the differences in resilience among the participants could be statistically explained by the combination of self-efficacy, coping strategies and their interaction, leaving the remaining variance to factors the model did not include, such as social support, family acceptance, socioeconomic conditions, experiences of discrimination, and other environmental variables. For intervention designers, that R-squared figure is encouraging, because it identifies a compact set of modifiable psychological targets that carry considerable explanatory weight.

The study’s ethical architecture reflects the sensitivity of working with a vulnerable and, in part, underage population. The protocol was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee at the Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, and the researchers obtained written parental or guardian consent alongside participant assent for those aged 10 to 17, while participants aged 18 to 24 provided their own written informed consent. All participants were told the purpose of the research, that participation was voluntary, that they could withdraw at any time without penalty, and that their responses would remain confidential and anonymous. The authors declared no competing interests and reported that the study received no external funding.

Like all cross-sectional designs, the study captures a snapshot rather than a trajectory, so it cannot establish whether high self-efficacy causes resilience, whether resilient young people simply come to believe in themselves more, or whether unmeasured third factors drive both. Longitudinal and experimental work will be needed to untangle that directionality. The borderline status of the interaction term, flagged by its confidence interval, likewise invites replication with larger and more diverse samples. Even so, the conditional-effects pattern aligns with a broader theoretical consensus that psychological strengths compound rather than merely add together, and it gives clinicians and programme designers a concrete hypothesis to test: that interventions pairing self-efficacy building with explicit coping-skills training should outperform approaches that target either resource alone.

For LGBTQ youth, whose resilience is forged under the persistent pressure of minority stress, that hypothesis carries real stakes. If adaptive coping genuinely amplifies the protective power of self-belief, then school counselling services, community organisations and digital mental health platforms have a clearer blueprint: teach young people not only that they can handle what comes, but how, concretely, to do it. The findings from this 405-person study suggest that the answer to why some marginalised youth bend without breaking may lie less in any single psychological trait than in the way traits work together, and that understanding those interactions may be the most efficient route to helping the young people who need it most.

Subject of Research: The moderating role of coping strategies in the relationship between self-efficacy and resilience among LGBTQ youth

Article Title: Coping strategies moderate the relationship between self efficacy and resilience among LGBTQ youth

Article References: Dua, K., & Bakhru, K. M. (2026). Coping strategies moderate the relationship between self efficacy and resilience among LGBTQ youth. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00886-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00886-2

Keywords: LGBTQ youth, resilience, self-efficacy, coping strategies, moderation analysis, PLS-SEM, mental health, minority stress, psychology, cross-sectional study, SmartPLS, bootstrapping