Gender Roles and Coping

This investigation examined the relationship of gender-role orientation as a psychological resource and specific behavioral coping responses as mitigators of distress for wives experiencing a long-term separation from their military spouses. Although an androgynous gender-role orientation was not directly associated with nondistress, it appeared to mitigate distress indirectly by influencing the coping patterns (family integrity, social support, managing tension and acceptance of lifestyle) wives used to manage the hardships of separation. Those wives experiencing the least distress coped by (a) accepting the lifestyle and being optimistic and (b) by developing self-reliance and esteem. Most importantly, nondistressed wives used a balanced coping strategy which reflected above-average use of all the coping patterns identified, in an effort to attend simultaneously to the family system needs of integration and stability and the personal growth and emotional needs of individual members. The findings from this investigation were discussed in terms of family stress theory, particularly the Double ABCX stress framework (McCubbin and Patterson, 1983a, 1983b) which has been advanced to describe postcrisis adaptation.