This research is aimed at increasing our understanding of individual differences in emotional responses to life stress. This will be done in an analysis of two previously collected epidemiologic data sets. The first is RAND's Health Insurance Experiment, a six-city five-wave panel study which contains information on exposure to life events and symptoms of psychiatric impairment. There are over 25,000 interviews in this data set, which makes it possible to examine event-by-event patterns of response across a set of important demographic contrasts. Such an analysis will be extremely important in pinpointing precisely which events have differentially damaging psychological effects on men vs. women, blacks vs. whites, the married vs. singles, and people in different classes. This, in turn, can refine our understanding of the structural correlates of vulnerability to stressful experiences. The second data set to be analyzed is the Deviant Adaptations to stress survey, a follow-up survey of some 7,000 young adults who took part in a series of school surveys a decade ago. This data set contains an unusually comprehensive set of questions about chronic and acute life strains, interpersonal and intrapsychic resources, and coping strategies. In addition, it contains several screening scales of psychiatric impairment. The proposed analysis of these data will examine the mediating and modifying influences of coping resources and coping strategies on the relationship between strains and impairment. This analysis will differ from previous attempts to develop empirical models of the stress process by disaggregating measures of strain into specific events or event clusters rather than working with a summary index of all life events to which the individual has been exposed. This disaggregation, coupled with a detailed decomposition of the effects of each life strain measure through the set of intervening measures of coping resources and strategies, will yield a uniquely detailed specification of the stress process.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter