Overview

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’).