The Similarity of Mothers' and Daughters' Coping Style, and its Relationship to Disordered Eating
Year: 2007
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The primary purpose of this study was to empirically investigate whether mothers of daughters with a diagnosed eating disorder differed in their coping style compared to mothers of daughters who did not evidence disordered eating symptoms.A secondary research goal was to examine whether daughters with and without eating disorders differed from their mothers in terms of coping styles.Social Learning Theory guided the premises of this study.It was hypothesized that mothers who had daughters with eating disorders would cope differently than mothers of daughters without eating disorders, and that mothers and their own daughters would cope similarly regardless of eating disorder symptomatology.Participants consisted of 58 mother/daughter dyads (N = 116) sampled from an Adolescent Health Center at a public hospital in a Midwestern state.The Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (Endler & Parker, 1999) was administered to both mothers and daughters to evaluate how they coped with stressful situations.Contrary to expectations, one-way multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVAs) revealed that mothers coped significantly differently on avoidance coping; follow-up univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that mothers who had daughters without eating disorders used more distraction-oriented coping than mothers of daughters with eating disorders.Moreover, daughters did not uniformly cope similarly to their mothers.Although daughters used similar degrees of emotion-oriented coping as their mothers, they used statistically significantly less avoidance-oriented coping.Exploratory follow-up analyses revealed that the two groups of mothers were significantly different in terms of family income, race, and degree of education.Implications of these results for counselor education, practice, and future research, including the possible mediating effects of demographic variables on coping styles, were discussed.
Author: Molly Cox
Institution: University of Akron
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2518162471