Stress assessment

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511543579.071

Stress assessment

from Psychology, health and illness

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014

Andrew Baum and

Angela Liegey Dougall

Edited by

John Weinman and

Andrew Baum: Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Angela Liegey Dougall: Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Susan Ayers: Affiliation:
University of Sussex
Andrew Baum: Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
Chris McManus: Affiliation:
St Mary's Hospital Medical School
Stanton Newman: Affiliation:
University College and Middlesex School of Medicine
Kenneth Wallston: Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University School of Nursing
John Weinman: Affiliation:
United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy's and St Thomas's
Robert West: Affiliation:
St George's Hospital Medical School, University of London

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Because stress is a complex process and occurs broadly and at many levels, assessment of it has been difficult and at times controversial. The proliferation of measurement protocols, continued confusion or inconsistency among theories and operational variables and the pervasiveness and depth of stress responses themselves all contribute to these difficulties. Regardless, a useful set of measures of stress-related phenomena has emerged and although several problems remain to be worked out, the development of comprehensive, convergent assessment strategies has allowed significant advances in our knowledge of stress and its contributions to health and illness. These approaches to measuring stress reflect prognostic solutions to key conceptual controversies in the field and permit measurement across different levels of response, points in the stress process, and acute and chronic timeframes. Here, we briefly consider some issues that complicate stress assessment and review available measures.

The most significant of these issues reflects the many different definitions of stress and conceptions of the nature and duration of its effects. Different assumptions and definitions will affect the operationalization of key constructs and the measures selected or developed. As discussed by Ayers and Steptoe in the chapter on ‘Stress & health’, the stress process includes environmental events and intrapsychic sources of stress that are called ‘stressors’, cognitive interpretation of these events and of one's capacity to adapt (‘appraisal’), emotional behavioural and biological changes associated with these variables (‘stress responses’, ‘strain’) and effects of these changes (‘consequences’).

Type: Chapter
Information: Cambridge Handbook of Psychology, Health and Medicine , pp. 326 - 330

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511543579.071 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2007

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