Effects of Individual and Marital Variables on Coping with Cancer

Abstract

Cancer patients and their families must cope with multiple stresses, which are altered by the quality of their relationships. Coping research, however, has given little attention to the impact of a spouse's coping style on the effectiveness of the other spouse's coping. To examine coping as an interpersonal process, the authors assessed the psychological distress, marital cohesion, marital satisfaction, marital history, and use of several coping strategics of 22 breast cancer patients and their husbands. The husband's coping behaviors and ratings of the relationship were the best predictors of the wife's psychological distress, whereas the husband s distress depended on a combination of his own and his wife's coping behaviors. These results suggest that interpersonal variables are equal to, or more important than, individual variables in the effectiveness of coping.