It is important to recognise that the major difficulty in trying to measure stress is the absence of a clear definition of stress itself .
Rob Briner of UCL offers a strong argument for reconceptualising stress suggesting that well-being phenomena are much broader than traditional approaches towards understanding stress. Indeed, psychological stress is considered as only one component of mental health.
Other components include autonomy, growth and actualisation, integration of the personality, accurate perceptions of reality, purpose in life, positive functions and others.
Furthermore, the affective nature of psychological well-being can be further differentiated into positive affect, negative affect, moods, emotions, psychological symptoms, and self esteem. From this perspective it is important to see psychological well-being not as a single construct but one which encompasses a range of interrelated phenomena.
This perspective has been expounded by the American researcher Lazarus:
“I want to underscore the most important limitation of stress measurement, namely, its unidimensional character, which is only modestly mitigated if we try to distinguish several types of stress such as harm, threat, and challenge, or eustress and distress. Stress is a part of a much broader and richer rubric, emotion...I propose that we would be wiser to move away from stress towards the measurement of emotion.” Richard Lazarus
Hans Selye’s understanding of stress as a biological phenomenon provides objective measures. However, objective measurement has concentrated on exploring the relative changes in physiological indicators under different levels of stress .
The issue of whether stressors actually lead to abnormal physiological symptoms has been largely neglected. Lazarus made it clear that stress is a subjective experience contingent upon perception of environmental stressors. As such, well-being is a phenomenological concept; it is relative to the person’s own phenomenal field. The phenomenological approach towards stress outcomes has formed a solid foundation upon which the extensive use of the questionnaire as a measure of felt or experienced stress has been built.
|