[Coping with stress by the elderly: a comparison of young, middle-aged and elderly couples]

The aim of this study was to investigate age effects on differences and similarities 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 individual coping are maintained constant if age differences are focused on. In our study we found high stability in the functional and dysfunctional individual coping over the three groups. By contrast, there are no studies except one for age effects on dyadic coping in the literature. Our results show differences in the positive emotional common dyadic coping and the total score of the positive common dyadic coping, both with the lowest values in the older couples.