Department of Psychology, Queen's University.
Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame.
J Abnorm Psychol. 2016 Jul;125(5):727-45. doi: 10.1037/abn0000178. Epub 2016 Jun 2.
Life stress is a central factor in the onset and course of a wide range of medical and psychiatric conditions. Determining the precise etiological and pathological consequences of stress, though, has been hindered by weaknesses in prevailing definitional and measurement practices. The purpose of the current paper is to evaluate the primary strategies for defining and measuring major and minor acute life events, chronic stressors, and daily hassles as informed by 3 basic scientific premises. The first premise concerns the manner in which stress is conceptualized and operationally defined, and specifically we assert that stress measures must not conflate the stress exposure with the stress response. The second premise concerns how stress exposures are measured, and we provide guidelines for optimizing standardized and sensitive indicators of life stress. The third premise addresses the consequences of variations in the procedures for life event measurement with regard to the validity of the research designs employed. We show that life stress measures are susceptible to several sources of bias, and if these potential sources of bias are not controlled in the design of the research, spurious findings may result. Our goal is to provide a useful guide for researchers who consider life stress to be an important factor in their theoretical models of disease, wish to incorporate measures of life stress in their research, and seek to avoid the common pitfalls of past measurement practices. (PsycINFO Database Record
生活压力是广泛的医学和精神疾病的发生和发展的一个核心因素。然而，由于当前定义和测量实践的缺陷，确定压力的确切病因和病理后果一直受到阻碍。本文的目的是根据 3 个基本科学前提，评估主要和次要急性生活事件、慢性应激源和日常困扰的定义和测量策略。第一个前提涉及压力的概念化和操作定义方式，具体而言，我们断言压力测量不能将压力暴露与压力反应混为一谈。第二个前提涉及如何测量压力暴露，我们提供了优化生活压力标准化和敏感指标的指南。第三个前提涉及生活事件测量程序变化对所采用研究设计有效性的影响。我们表明，生活压力测量容易受到多种偏差来源的影响，如果在研究设计中不能控制这些潜在的偏差来源，可能会导致虚假发现。我们的目标是为那些认为生活压力是其疾病理论模型的一个重要因素的研究人员提供有用的指南，这些人员希望在其研究中纳入生活压力测量，并且希望避免过去测量实践中的常见陷阱。
