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

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]