Communal coping manifested in daily Life: A focus on gender

Abstract

Communal coping consists of a shared appraisal of a stressor and collaborative efforts to manage it. There has been a wealth of literature linking communal coping to relationship and health outcomes, but there is little research on the context in which communal coping occurs or how communal coping is manifested in daily life. The first and second study goals were to examine the implications of gender for the components of communal coping (shared appraisal, collaboration) and for potential manifestations of communal coping in daily life (e.g., shared meals). Our third study goal was to examine whether shared appraisal and collaboration in the context of diabetes generalized to another domain—household chore distribution—and whether these relations were moderated by gender. As an exploratory goal, we examined intersections of gender with race. Participants were 203 couples in which one person had been recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Shared appraisal and collaboration were assessed with multiple methods. Results showed greater shared appraisal and collaboration when patients were male than when they were female. This finding extended to some, but not all, of the daily life behaviors. Actor–partner interdependence models showed that the relations of actor and partner shared appraisal to household labor depended on both role (patient, spouse) and gender; relations of actor and partner collaboration depended only on role. Findings were not moderated by race. These results highlight the need to consider gender in the context of communal coping.