stress

An imprecise concept, popular in everyday and academic discourse. It may refer to external situational pressures (stressors) or to the responses to them (stress reactions)-responses usually assumed to have physical and psychological components, such as raised pulse-rate and adrenalin levels, and feelings of anxiety and discomfort. In either usage it is commonly invoked as a key factor in explanations of bodily and mental ill-health, various forms of under-performance, and deviant behaviour. Its attraction to social scientists lies in its potential to link features of the individual's present or recent social situation to some specified outcome.

Much of the sociological debate focuses on identifying and measuring the domain of the stressful. Some researchers assume only negative occurrences like divorce or unemployment are stressful, others any situation involving significant change (for example marriage, job promotion, or moving house); some incorporate only life-events, others include ongoing difficulties; some employ standardized measures (for example the Social Readjustment Rating Scale), others assess subjective meanings, arguing that what is stressful for one may not be stressful for another. However, subjective assessments of stressful experiences are problematic since they may be contaminated by the very feelings generated by that experience, as for example in the case of clinically depressed individuals who retrospectively identify a particular life-event as stressful in order either to co-operate in treatment or to facilitate self-understanding of their (otherwise mysterious) illness. George Brown and Tirril Harris, in their influential study Social Origins of Depression (1978), measure meaning not by direct subjective evaluations but through contextual evidence about values, objectives, and circumstances.

Of increasing interest in the field is the identification of factors such as social support that mediate between stressful situations and responses to them. Brown and Harris term these ‘vulnerability’ or, conversely, ‘coping’ factors, examining situationally generated rather than biological vulnerability.