Adolescent girls who acquire sexually transmitted diseases are a serious public health problem and are at greater risk for subsequent acquisition. In order to evaluate and improve interventions, it is important to understand whether girls cope with STD acquisition primarily as a health related problem or as an interpersonal problem. This study compared adolescent girls’ ways of coping with the acquisition of an STD to ways of coping with other types of interpersonal problems.

Forty-four adolescent girls with sexually transmitted diseases were recruited from a primary care setting as part of a broader study on adolescent health and sexual behavior. The Kidcope, a brief, 10 item measure widely used in pediatric settings, was administered by a trained research assistant to assess the girls’ reported methods of coping and degree of helpfulness both in regards to the acquisition of an STD and an additional personal problem which they identified. Speannan Rho correlations and paired T-tests were used to determine whether coping for STD acquisition was similar to coping with other interpersonal problems.

With one exception, girls appeared to use similar strategies for both STD acquisition and other interpersonal problems. Further, girls displayed similar patterns of perceived helpfulness of coping strategies in both types of events. Girls were more likely to use wishful thinking as a coping strategy with STD acquisition than with other types of interpersonal problems. Girls who used wishful thinking extensively uniformly rated it as an unhelpful coping strategy. For both types of events there was a wide distribution of other coping strategies.

Adolescent girls with sexually transmitted diseases display a tendency to treat STD acquisition as an interpersonal event rather than primarily a medical one. They are more likely to use ineffective strategies such as “wishful thinking” in response to acquisition than they are in response to an interpersonal stressor even though they recognize it as non-helpful. Primary care physicians should communicate with patients recognizing that medical sequelae of acquisition may not be primary for the patient.