4.3.7 - Measuring stress

Why measuring stress is difficult

Psychologists cannot study stress properly unless they can measure it. That sounds simple until you notice that stress has two sides. It is a private experience - how threatening, uncontrollable or overwhelming a person finds a situation - but it is also a bodily response involving autonomic arousal. A good stress measure therefore has to balance subjective meaning with objective evidence.

Psychologists can approach those two sides using self-report and physiological measures.

The contrasting route records a bodily response.

For AQA, the named self-report scales are the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) and the Hassles and Uplifts Scale. The named physiological measure is skin conductance response (SCR). AO1 means knowing how each measure works. AO2 means applying the measure to a scenario, such as a student, nurse or employee whose stress is being assessed. AO3 means judging validity, reliability, objectivity and practical usefulness.

A central exam idea is that no single measure captures "stress itself" perfectly. A person may report very high stress but show modest physiological arousal at the moment of testing. Another person may show a high SCR because they are excited, hot or physically active rather than stressed. The strongest answers treat each measure as useful evidence with limits, not as a magic stress detector.

The Social Readjustment Rating Scale

The SRRS estimates the cumulative readjustment associated with major life changes.

Holmes and Rahe developed the SRRS from the idea that major life changes can create stress because they force a person to readjust. The important point is that the event does not have to be unpleasant. Marriage, retirement or an outstanding personal achievement may be positive, but they still require change, planning and adaptation.

The SRRS contains 43 life events. Each event has a fixed numerical value called a life change unit.

In construction of the scale, raters judged the amount of readjustment required by different events, using marriage as the reference point. The average ratings were converted into LCUs. For example, death of a spouse is usually listed as 100 LCUs, marriage as 50 LCUs, being fired at work as 47 LCUs, and a minor violation of the law as 11 LCUs.

To use the SRRS, a participant ticks the events they have experienced in the specified period and the LCUs are added. The total is interpreted as an index of life-change stress. A high total suggests the person has experienced many or severe changes and may be at greater risk of stress-related illness. For AQA, it is enough to explain that the SRRS measures cumulative life change; do not turn it into a diagnosis.

AO2 example: Amir has moved house, started a new sixth form, had a parent become seriously ill, and begun a part-time job. An SRRS approach would add the LCUs for those life changes to estimate the amount of readjustment Amir has faced. It would not ask whether Amir personally sees the new school as exciting or threatening, unless the researcher adds extra questions.

AO3 evaluation starts with that weakness. The SRRS is standardised and quick, so it allows comparisons between people and large groups. However, it gives the same LCU score to the same event for everyone. Divorce may be devastating for one person and a relief for another. AQA mark schemes also credit limitations such as retrospective recall problems, self-presentation bias, unclear illness outcomes and weak or correlational links between SRRS scores and later illness.

Worked scoring and interpretation

Suppose a researcher supplies these LCU values: marriage = 50, being fired = 47 and change of residence = 20. Someone reporting all three events has a total of 50 + 47 + 20 = 117 LCUs. This is a sum of assigned readjustment weights, not 117 days of stress or a 117% chance of illness.

Two people can obtain 117 for quite different experiences. Standardised scoring means the same recorded events produce the same total, but does not establish accurate recall, stable experiences over time or valid measurement of each person’s distress. Reliability of a scoring rule and validity of its interpretation are separate questions.

The Hassles and Uplifts Scale

Hassles and uplifts scales record everyday demands and positive experiences from the participant’s perspective.

The Hassles and Uplifts approach was created as a direct challenge to relying only on major life events. Kanner, Coyne, Schaefer and Lazarus argued that small daily irritations may be more useful for predicting stress outcomes because they are frequent, repeated and close to the person's lived experience.

The scale also records positive everyday experiences.

The original Hassles Scale has 117 items covering areas such as work, family, health, friends, practical concerns, finances and the environment. Participants identify which hassles they have experienced and rate their severity, commonly on a three-point scale such as somewhat, moderately or extremely severe. This makes the measure more sensitive to personal appraisal than the SRRS, because the participant judges how severe the hassle was for them.

The Uplifts Scale was constructed in a similar way and contains 135 items in the original Kanner et al. approach. It records small positive experiences and their strength or frequency. The logic is not simply that uplifts "cancel out" hassles, but that stress measurement becomes richer if it records both repeated demands and the positive experiences that may support coping.

Research evidence is useful for AO3. Kanner et al. (1981) found that hassles were a better predictor of concurrent and later psychological symptoms than life-event scores. DeLongis et al. (1982) extended this by showing that hassles were more strongly related to somatic health than major life events, while uplifts made little independent contribution once hassles were taken into account. This supports the value of measuring daily stressors, but it also reminds us that the evidence is correlational.