Selfreport measures

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after an examination, during a job interview or whilst undergoing physical activity.
Naturalistic research also examines the impact of ongoing stressors such as work-related
stress, normal ‘daily hassles’, poverty or marriage conflicts. These types of studies have
provided important information on how people react to both acute and chronic stress in
their everyday lives.
Costs and benefits of different settings
Both laboratory and naturalistic settings have their costs and benefits:
1. The degree of stressor delivered in the laboratory setting can be controlled so that
differences in stress response can be attributed to aspects of the individual rather than
to the stressor itself.
2. Researchers can artificially manipulate aspects of the stressor in the laboratory to
examine corresponding changes in physiological and psychological measures.
3. Laboratory researchers can artificially manipulate mediating variables such as
control and the presence or absence of social support to assess their impact on the
stress response.
4. The laboratory is an artificial environment which may produce a stress response
which does not reflect that triggered by a more natural environment. It may also
produce associations between variables (i.e. control and stress) which might be an
artefact of the laboratory.
5. Naturalistic settings allow researchers to study real stress and how people really cope
with it.
6. However, there are many other uncontrolled variables which the researcher needs to
measure in order to control for it in the analysis.
Physiological measures
Physiological measures are mostly used in the laboratory as they involve participants
being attached to monitors or having fluid samples taken. However, some ambulatory
machines have been developed which can be attached to people as they carry on with
their normal activities. To assess stress reactivity from a physiological perspective
researchers can use a polygraph to measure heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure
and the galvanic skin response (GSR which is effected by sweating). They can also take
blood, urine or saliva samples to test for changes in catecholamine and cortisol
production.
Self-report measures
Researchers use a range of self-report measures to assess both chronic and acute stress.
Some of these focus on life events and include the original Social Readjustment Rating
Scale (SRRS, Holmes and Rahe 1967) which asks about events such as ‘death of a
spouse’, ‘changing to a different line of work’ and ‘change of residence’. Other measures
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focus more on an individual’s own perception of stress. The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS,
Cohen et al. 1983) is the most commonly used scale to assess self perceived stress and
asks questions such as ‘In the last month how often have you been upset because of
something that happened unexpectedly?’, and ‘In the last month how often have you felt
nervous or stressed?’. Some researchers also assess minor stressors in the form of ‘daily
hassles’. Kanner et al. (1981) developed the Hassles Scale which asks participants to rate
how severe a range of hassles have been over the past month including ‘misplacing or
losing things’, ‘health of a family member’ and ‘concerns about owing money’. Selfreport measures have been used to describe the impact of environmental factors on stress
whereby stress is seen as the outcome variable (i.e. ‘a poor working environment causes
high stress’). They have also been used to explore the impact of stress on the individual’s
health status whereby stress in seen as the input variable (i.e. ‘high stress causes poor
health’).
Costs and benefits of different measures
Physiological and self-report measures of stress are used in the main to complement each
other. The former reflects a more physiological emphasis and the latter a more psychological perspective. A researcher who has a greater interest in physiology might
argue that physiological measures are more central to stress research, whilst another
researcher who believes that experience is more important might favour self-report. Most
stress researchers measure both physiological and psychological aspects of stress and
study how these two components interact. However, in general the different types of
measures have the following costs and benefits:
1. Physiological measures are more objective and less effected by the participant’s wish
to give a desirable response or the researcher’s wish to see a particular result.
2. Self-report measures reflect the individual’s experience of stress rather than just what
their body is doing.
3. Self-report measures can be influenced by problems with recall, social desirability,
different participants’ interpreting the questions in different ways.
4. Self-report measures are based upon the life events or hassles that have been
chosen by the author of the questionnaire. One person’s hassle such as ‘troublesome neighbours’ which appears on the hassles scale may not be a hassle for
another whereas worries about a child’s school might be which doesn’t appear on this
scale.
Associations between research in different settings using different measures
Given that stress research takes place in both the laboratory and in more naturalistic
setting and uses both physiological and self-report measures it is important to know how
these different studies relate to each other. This is illustrated in Focus on research 10.1
below.
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