What Do People Say About Coping Communally (Or Not) with Sexual Health Stress in Online Forums?

Abstract

Communal coping theorists have advanced our understanding of stress management in relationships. We add to that work by exploring the content of messages that people exchange when they talk about how they coped with stress. We collected data from 39 online forums and analyzed 446 posts in which people described how they coped with sexual health stress. Results indicated the presence of five types of coping (individual coping, parallelism, communal coping, refused communal coping, reluctant communal coping), distinguished by posters’ descriptions of emotions, communication, and relationships in each category. Our findings indicate the need to consider valence in the study of communal coping.

Keywords:

• Action
• appraisal
• communal Coping
• message Features
• sexual Health

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank research assistants Anastasia Condos, Jordan Diver, Rachel Holderman, Emma Schambach, and O’Livia Stalter for their work collecting and coding data for this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The dataset was derived from sources in the public domain.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erin D. Basinger

Erin D. Basinger (PhD, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) is an Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research centers on how people cope with health-related stress, and she does advocacy work surrounding the role of weight stigma in the healthcare system.

Justin Hughes

Justin Hughes earned his Master of Arts degree from the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2023. He is a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force.

Kelsey Singer

Kelsey Singer earned her Master of Arts degree from the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2022. She works in management and communications.

Amy L. Delaney

Amy L. Delaney (PhD, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Carle Health in Urbana, Illinois. Her work centers on improving equity in healthcare experiences and outcomes for patients, practitioners, staff, and community members.