Stress

As family stress researchers study the resourceful ways in which individuals and families resist stressors, they have also called attention to the ways that social and economic factors shape both their exposure to stressors and their abilities to respond.

In considering the relationship between stressful circumstances on the one hand and family members' individual well-being and overall family functioning on the other, research has tended to focus on two main questions: How can variations in exposure to social stressors explain variations in individual and family outcomes? How, in a group of individuals or families who have been exposed to the same stressor, can variations in individual and family capacities, resources, and coping efforts explain variations in outcomes? Exposure to social stressors. An example of the former is the investigation conducted by Pearlin and his colleagues (1981) into the effect of occupational disruptions on emotional distress. They compared those who had faced recent disruptions with respondents who had not, with statistical controls for other variables known to affect both the likelihood of disruption and the levels of emotional distress, and traced the effects of disruption through diminished self-esteem and compromised sense of mastery to increased distress. Similarly, early family stress research examined exposure to stressors linked to social organization and societal crises, such as widespread male unemployment and extended separations brought on by World War II (see Hill 1949).

These early studies focused on men's unemployment as a social stressor for themselves and their families. As women's employment increased, studies began to examine whether women's holding multiple social roles—both family roles as spouse and mother and work roles as employee—operated as a social stressor, with adverse consequences for themselves and other family members, particularly children. This research has generally been inconclusive: simple cross-sectional contrasts between employed and not-employed mothers have found, if anything, an average benefit of employment for women and little significant differences in their children's outcomes. Ingrid Waldron and her colleagues (1998) provide an example of this line of research, as well as an overview of theoretical arguments regarding how combinations of marriage, mothering, and employment may affect women's health. They find little evidence that combining employment and mothering has adverse effects on physical health. They suggest that marriage and employment each provide similar resources to women, namely income and social supports, and that they can substitute for one another in having a beneficial impact on health. Conversely, these findings suggest that the absence of both marriage and employment will be associated with more negative outcomes.

In extensions of this line of research, researchers have argued that the effects of having a particular role or role combination are not uniform, but depend on the role conditions one encounters. For example, research in this tradition focused on employment emphasizes that for men as well as Social stressors like low income, unemployment, divorce,single parenthood, and family conflict can beget additional stressors, such as applying for welfare, as this woman is doing. STEPHEN FERRY/GAMMA LIAISON NETWORK for women, employment in occupations that are free from close supervision and provide opportunities for substantively complex and self-directed work will yield benefits, whereas employment in dull, repetitive, and closely supervised work will not (Kohn and Schooler 1983; Menaghan 1991). Similarly, all marriages are not equal in their costs and benefits, with high-conflict, hostile, or distant relationships more distressing than their counterparts. In support of these arguments, Elizabeth Menaghan and her colleagues (1997) show that the quality of mothers' employment, as well as the quality of their marital relationships, affect mother-child interaction and adolescent children's academic and behavior outcomes.

Variations in response to stressors as a function of resources. An example of the latter question is Glen Elder's (1974) study of families who faced serious economic decline during the Great Depression. Elder investigated whether couples with more cohesive marital bonds at a prior point were better able to respond to the economic difficulties they faced. Here, the cohesion of marital bonds is conceptualized as a family-level resource that accounted for a difference in outcomes among couples all facing the same economic stressor. In general, family stress researchers have conceptualized stressful outcomes as a function of three major factors: the stressor, family resources, and appraisal or interpretation (Hill 1949). Extending this model, Yoav Lavee and his colleagues emphasized potential changes over time in each of these factors (see Lavee, McCubbin, and Patterson 1985). Work by Pauline Boss (1999) calls attention to the critical role of appraisal in influencing family members' responses to ambiguous or incomplete losses, including family members who are missing, suffering from dementia, or geographically or emotionally distant.

These same factors are also central to studies of stress at the individual level. Pearlin and his colleagues (1981) stress how material, social, and psychosocial resources, including optimistic appraisals, help to account for variations in the individual distress aroused by stressful circumstances in normative adult roles such as marriage, employment, and parenting. In both literatures, economic resources, social supports from others, coping strategies, and individual levels of self-esteem and mastery are viewed as central resources that can reduce the negative impact of social stressors (Mirowsky and Ross 1986; Turner 1999).

One of the pathways by which social stressors may create adverse impacts is by reducing resources themselves. For example, a period of involuntary unemployment may have a less disastrous impact on families with greater savings. If the period of unemployment is prolonged, however, or if unemployment recurs, families may literally "spend down" their resources. This is probably easiest to measure in terms of tangible resources like savings, but the general argument holds as well for more subtle resources like a sense of mastery over one's circumstances. At any single time point, having more optimistic and internal attitudes may help one to manage potential stressors. But over time, exposure to stressors may cumulatively reduce those feelings of control. Thus, current levels of resources may partially reflect the cumulative history of encounters with social stressors.

Who is exposed to social stressors? To fully understand the processes by which stressors affect families, we also need to consider how social stressors are distributed in populations. Exposure to difficult life events or constraining social circumstances is not a random process, and it is important to view variations in exposure to stressors as a phenomenon that itself needs to be explained. For example, Jay Turner and colleagues (1995) study what they call the epidemiology of social stress. They find that the distribution of exposure to social stressors varies significantly by age, gender, marital status, and occupational status, and this distribution parallels the distribution of depressive symptoms and major depressive disorder across the same factors. Catherine Ross and Marieke Van Willigen (1997) also point to educational attainment as a crucial resource that shapes subsequent exposure to more or less stressful circumstances.

Turner and Lloyd (1999) extend this analysis, and find that exposure to social stressors, as well as levels of personal resources and social supports, can explain, on the one hand, observed links between age, gender, marital status, and socioeconomic status, and mental health outcomes on the other. In particular, the linkage between lower socioeconomic status and higher depressive symptoms is completely accounted for by the greater exposure to stressors and fewer resources and social supports of those with lower educations, occupations, and incomes.