Women And Stress Research

Stress has increasingly become associated with greater susceptibility to various illnesses. The condition is also costly from an economic and financial perspective, but such costs hardly reflect the human costs of emotional trauma and physical suffering that result from the illness. Women today are in a situation where both the monetary and human effects of stress take their toll as women face unprecedented pressures in accommodating the demands of home and career and personal family stresses that often result. In addition to this, while women are prone to the same stressors as men, they are confronted with potentially unique physical and psychological stressors of their own. They may also become stress "carriers" as in the abusive husband and unfair boss relationship. Ironically, despite these differences women live longer than men, although collectively they are reported to have more symptoms, illnesses, intake of drugs and doctor-hospital visits. This outstanding new book by a pioneer in stress research presents an essential analysis of this increasingly relevant subject.

First published in 1986. This book is concerned with the stressors women undergo from adolescence to old age and the resources, especially interpersonal resources, women use to cope with these stressors. There follows a series of chapters that address the use of social support as a resource for coping with stressful life events that confront women in a variety of contexts during their life span.

Until recently, studies of women's health received scant research attention in the context of the overall magnitude of research conducted on health. Even for health issues that affect both men and women, most research has been limited to male subjects, leaving a large gap in our knowledge base concerning women's health. Finally, the decade of the 1990s is ushering in a shift in this inequity. In 1990 the U.S. National Institutes of Health issued a compelling report citing the lack of sufficient research on women's health as a major gap in our knowledge, and a mandate has been issued to add women as study subjects in research or to document why they have not been included. Such directives will undoubtedly lead to a much-needed burgeoning of research activities in the area of women's health as we approach the twenty-first century. Despite limited research resources, however, there have been steady, scientifically rigorous voices in the wilderness for the last several years, and many of the best investigators are represented in this volume. These workers have led the vanguard in exploring psychosocial factors that are likely to differentially affect women's and men's health. For example, women and men engage in social roles that often differ, if not in quantity, then certainly in quality. Sex differences in role expectations, environmen tal qualities, role burdens related to the domains of work and family, and abilities to adapt to and cope with stressful situations may have a distinctive impact on health.

A comprehensive work that brings together and explores state-of-the-art research on the link between stress and health outcomes. Offers the most authoritative resource available, discussing a range of stress theories as well as theories on preventative stress management and how to enhance well-being Timely given that stress is linked to seven of the ten leading causes of death in developed nations, yet paradoxically successful adaptation to stress can enable individuals to flourish Contributors are an international panel of authoritative researchers and practitioners in the various specialty subjects addressed within the work

The media have heightened public awareness of the high personal and social costs of stress, yet major gaps remain in the understanding of work stress. One of the most serious limitations of published research is its focus on males; much of it fails to include gender as a key variable. This report presents an overview of recent literature on women, work and stress, highlighting current and emerging issues in this area, evaluating whether women's needs and concerns have been addressed, suggesting how they might be better addressed in future research, and examining the link between stress reduction and child care, employment equity, parental leave, and other public policies designed to achieve greater social and economic equality between men and women.

"Now with a new afterword by the author"--Back cover.

In the years following World War II the health and well-being of the nation was of primary concern to the British government. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between health and stress in post-war Britain through a series of carefully connected case studies.