Stress more devastating for less educated peoples health: Study

Articles: Stress more devastating for less educated peoples health: Study

Posted by admin on Tuesday, May 11, 2004 - 07:05 AM

Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center researchers have reported that while less educated people report fewer stressful days than those with more education, their stress is more severe and has a greater impact on their health.
The research has been published in the current issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Joseph G. Grzywacz, an assistant professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine has said that studies on stress typically overlook daily stressors or hassles, which are different from chronic or acute stressors, such as major illnesses or loss of a loved one. "What makes this study unique is that we asked people what happened to them each day of the study, and it was done with a national sample," said Grzywacz. The main finding is that daily stressors are not random. A lot of attention has been given to inequalities in health. There is a well-documented disparity between the advantaged and disadvantaged based on studies of death rates and rates of disease. Grzywacz's study also used education as a measure of socioecomonic status. "Less advantaged people are less healthy on a daily basis and are more likely to have downward turns in their health. The downward turns in health were connected with daily stressors, and the effect of daily stressors on their health is much more devastating for the less advantaged," said Grzywacz. He said that different people could look at the same stressors in very different ways. For one person, a rainy day might seem a little gloomy or have no impact at all but for a labourer, it could mean no work and no money, which means high level of stress. Grzywacz said that future research might measure the impact of all three types of stressors- acute, chronic and daily. For this study, a total of 1,031 adults were interviewed daily for eight days. Each day, they were asked, "Since we last talked, has anything stressful happened. Tell me about that." The adults gave each stressor a rank from low to high severity. Their responses were rated by trained coders to find out the severity of stressors. People with less than a high school degree reported experiencing stressors on 30 percent of the study days. Those with a high school degree reported stress on 38 percent of days and those with a college degree reported stress on 44 percent of days.

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