Daily Stress in Midlife
Charting the ebb and flow of people's lives
Life's big crises always cause stress — divorce, a death in the
family, losing a job, crashing a car. But what about the little things
that gradually build up from day to day — arguing with a co-worker,
fighting traffic, missing deadlines? How do these irritations affect
your daily well-being?
Until now, no one has really studied these smaller pressures over
time in a national sample, according to David Almeida, an assistant
professor in the School of Family and Consumer Resources. Using an in-depth
telephone interviewing technique, he and his graduate students have
amassed data from nearly 12,000 interviews taken from 1500 people across
the country.
"This has been my life for the past four years," Almeida says. "I
believe that the little frustrations and challenges of daily life play
a big role in determining our well-being and personal development. The
tricky part is how to measure these common daily stressors."
Almeida believes the best way to understand people's lives is to chart
their experience over a series of days. He chose to conduct telephone
diary interviews rather than rely on participants to fill out daily
diaries.
"The biggest drawback with self-report diaries is that the people
who have time to fill them out aren't that stressed," Almeida says.
His telephone interviews are part of the National Study of Daily Experiences
(NSDE), funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation,
the National Institute of Mental Health, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
The 1500 participants in the study were randomly drawn from a sample
of 8000 people who were already part of a larger study on midlife in
the U.S. The sample is representative of all 48 contiguous states, and
includes people from different ethnicities, education levels, ages and
economic background as well as equal numbers of men and women. The group
includes 250 twin pairs—half identical and half fraternal—so
the researchers can study the way genetic traits affect reactions to
stress.
"Because 1500 is a large number of people, I had to limit the number
of consecutive days we could interview each one," Almeida says. He decided
to interview each participant for eight days in a row. "We collected
data throughout an entire year, interviewing 30 to 40 people every week.
I had ten part-time workers and one supervisor." Interviewers included
students from The University of Arizona, and from the University of
Michigan, where he began this research.
Almeida set up a special format for collecting data, consisting of
a series of structured questions that would put the participant at ease
and lead into gathering detailed descriptions of the events the person
had experienced that day, and his or her reaction to them. The interviewers
called between 6:00 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. each night.
"Interviewers were trained to probe enough to get highly specific,
short narratives of daily stress," Almeida says. Initial questions covered
daily arguments, disagreements, discrimination, and anything else the
participant considered stressful. Other questions related to time use;
giving and volunteering; physical health symptoms; non-specific psychological
stress; work productivity and cutbacks; and a general daily review of
stressful experiences.
"What we found out was that people really liked talking to us," Almeida
says. "Most people are used to talking about their problems on the telephone,
and we actually had to figure out a protocol to end the interview. It
was very important for us to be very respectful. I was amazed at how
much of their lives they opened up to us." The interviewers took care
not to develop any sort of therapeutic relationship with the participants.
If someone was in trouble, the interviewer offered a list of numbers
for the person to call to get help.
During the interviews, the information was both taped and entered directly
into a computer so it could be analyzed the next day. Six UA students
transcribed and coded the comments for qualitative analysis. Almeida
says the data are so rich, he'll be analyzing them on many different
levels for the next few years.
"The immediate goal is to get a picture of daily stress in the U.S.,"
Almeida says. "But the ultimate goal isn't to describe stress, it's
to determine who is most likely to experience stressful situations and
to explore the differing ways people react to them."
"If we could figure out who's more likely to be exposed we could devise
programs to reduce stress," Almeida says. "We could devise ways to help
people cope with daily stress." When people feel they have more control
over their environment, they tend to perceive it as less stressful.
Preliminary Results
• Men and women report having at least one physical health complaint
an average of four days a week. Women experience slightly more physical
complaints, especially those aged 45-54. They reported having more headaches
and muscle soreness than older and younger women. Older adults were
more likely than younger adults to have symptoms that lasted all day,
although the frequency of physical health complaints was not highest
for them.
• On average, participants had at least one stressful experience
between one and three days per week. Women's daily stress peaked between
ages 35-44. During this time women had more stress at work and at home
than at other periods of adulthood. The frequency of daily stress decreased
throughout the rest of middle adulthood for both men and women. A decline
in interpersonal tensions was responsible for the decrease. Negative
events that happen to friends or relatives was the only category of
daily stress that was more frequent during middle and later adulthood.
• Women at midlife, ages 45-54, provided more emotional support
to others than during any other period of life. During this time women
listened to, comforted, and advised others an average of one day a week
more than younger and older women. Women at midlife were twice as likely
to emotionally support their parents and three times more likely to
emotionally support children, compared to younger and older women.
Article written by Susan McGinley, ECAT, College of
Agriculture
This is part of the 1997 Arizona Experiment Station Research Report
This document is located at http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/general/resrpt1997/stress_in_midlife.html
Return to Index for 1997 report
Researcher:
David Almeida
School of Family and Consumer Resources
(520) 621-7127
almeida@u.arizona.edu
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