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Daughters don’t merely imitate their mothers’ coping styles: A comparison of the coping strategies used by mothers and their daughters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2015

Elizabeth Lade
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
Erica Frydenberg*
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
Charles Poole
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
*
University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3052, Phone: (03) 9344 6315, Phone: (08) 8302 6611, Fax: (03) 9349 1915, E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The coping styles of 61 mother/daughter dyads were investigated to establish the extent to which mothers and daughters share coping strategies and to examine cohort effects on coping. For this sample, mothers and daughters generally agreed on the preferred coping styles. However, one strategy showed a positive correlation between mothers and doughters, and two showed a slight negative correlation. When similarities of individual profiles were used to determine clusters, most of the groups which appeared contained mainly mothers or doughters. Cohort effects appear to be much stronger in determining patterns of preferred coping strategy than are family influences.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Australian Psychological Society 1998

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