Thursday, 22 December 2011

Stress in everyday life

Measuring stress

  • Self report questionnaires on frequency of life stress.
  • Self report questionnaires on perceived stress.
  • Semi structures interviews in which the P talks through their life stress.
Holmes and Rahe (1967) -social readjustment rating scale (SRRS)

Aim: to construct instrument to measure stress defined as amount of change an individual has had to deal with during a particular amount of time.
Procedure: To rate impact of life events they asked 394 p's to compared 43 life events.
Result: LCU scores for year were associated with likelihood of physical illness within the following year. e.g. a person with LCU score of 200-300 had 50% chance of developing illness
Conclusion: High stress = high chance of illness.
+/-: bias, carried out in USA.
Retrospective.
Life changes are unexpected.
Any change is stressful, even positive.
Some life events are not every day occurances.

Rahe (1970) - NAVY PERSONELL


Aim: Investigate link between LCU's and illness in a sample of healthy p's.
Procedure: 2500 us navy personnell filled in SRRS for previous 6 mths.
Followed up over 7 mths tour of duty and all stress related illness recorded and rated for number and severity producing an overall illness score.
Results:  found positive correlation between LCU scores and illness scores.
Conclusion: there is a relationship between life events and development of stress related illness as correlation was low however other factors may have been involved.
+/-: doesn't provide causality, only association
retrospective questionnaires.


  • LES Sarason

- Allows people to rate 57 life events in terms of impact of both positive and negative allowing for individual differences.
This produces a positive, negative and total change.

  • Hassles and uplifts scale- Lazarus
- 117 items covering aspects of daily life.
- Life contained uplifts that counteracted negative events.
- Scores on the hassles scale correlate with stress related problems like depression and anxiety.
- Client focuses on dealing with hassles and enhancing uplifts.


No comments:

Post a Comment