Coping in elderly couples: A comparison with young and middle-aged couples

The aim of this study was to investigate age effects on differences and sim ilarities of individual and dyadic coping in 242 couples. There exist only a few systematically designed studies for age effects on individual coping. The majority of the results show that functional and dysfunctional individ ual coping are maintained constant if age differences are focused on. In ou r study we found high stability in the functional and dysfunctional individ ual coping over the three groups. By contrast, there are no studies except one for age effects on dyadic copi ng in the literature. Our results show differences in the positive emotiona l common dyadic coping and the total score of the positive common dyadic co ping, both with the lowest values in the older couples.