| Abstract
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A cross sectional study compared the coping styles of 60 African American men and women to 101 White males and females. This study was done to examine what specific adaptive and also maladaptive coping styles are used by HIV-positive African Americans compared to Whites. The goal was to tease out any specific cultural differences in how Africans Americans handle being HIV-positive. Given the rise in new HIV-infection rates among African Americans, it is important to examine what factors help increase the quality of life for this group of people, specifically what coping and social support look like for this population. Social support, referring to one's immediate and extended network of family and friends that can be called on in times of need, was operationalized as satisfaction with one's social support network. Compared to Whites, African Americans utilized spirituality to cope with being HIV-positive more often, had greater satisfaction with social support, showed greater endorsement of spiritual beliefs, and were also more likely to utilize denial as a coping strategy to deal with being HIV-positive. For African Americans, the greater the access to community resources the less mood disturbance, the greater utilization of denial as a coping style the higher their mood disorder, and the less the mood disturbance the less behavioral disengagement. Also, the use of denial as a coping tool should be examined to see if it may have a positive effect on adjusting to and living with being HIV-positive. Future research may also focus on developing more culture-specific questionnaires for HIV-positive African Americans that identify what African Americans with HIV consider as having access to community resources, what qualifies as spiritual growth, how they identify when they are becoming depressed, and also how they assess their overall mental health. More research needs to be conducted to see what coping styles are utilized by HIV-positive African Americans that prevent the use of negative denial as coping strategy. One of the limitations of the study was its small sample size. It was also a highly distressed, highly impoverished population. The White sample consisted of primarily low SES, homosexual participants, which restricted the generalizability of the findings. The hypotheses were also examined using a cross-sectional design and data from a sample of convenience that was drawn from a larger study.
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