| Description |
Health care professionals are increasingly concerned as they recognize the influence of life stress upon the health of those within contemporary society. Research supports this concern by substantiating the hypothesis that life stress can evoke a wide variety of physiological and psychological changes that lead to disease. That change in an individual's life situation act as stressors is a major consideration of current research into life stress. Changes in the relationship of people to their social group and in their relations to other people of importance in their lives are being investigated as sufficient cause in influencing the etiology of disease. With emphasis in health care shifting from restoration of health following an illness to prevention of illness, nurses, particularly mental health nurses, must recognize common and recurrent life stresses in a variety of sociocultural groups and individuals. The purpose of this study was to explore the extent to which measures of life stress in children and their mothers was associated and to gain an understanding into specific stress indices of mothers as they related to preschool children. In this study the association of stress measures in a group of preschool children and their mothers was investigated, with the hypothesis being that measures of life stress and social readjustment would be significantly associated with measures of life stress in their mothers. A descriptive design retrospectively surveying life stresses and social readjustment in preschool children and their mothers was used to test the hypothesis. The sample included 101 preschool children and their mothers who volunteered from nursery school population sin urban areas of Utah. The study was conducted by using the Utah Stress Scales (USS) developed by Sullivan (1977) as a health assessment tool for pregnant women. Modified from Holmes and Rahe's (1967) Schedule of Recent Experience (SRE), the USS survey was a 105 item instrument based on a set of 6 scales of stress which can be weighed for differing variables. The scales, covering time periods of 0-6. 6-12, and 0-12 months were: Social Stress, Work Stress, Family Stress, Financial Stress, Life Style Stress, and Personal Stress. Measurement of preschool children's stress was determined by the Coddington Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS), which was modified from the SRE to measure the relative value as well as the rank order of different stressful life events in children of varying ages. Coddington's scale (Coddington, 1972b) consists of 30 life event items, specific to preschool children. For testing, the mother of the preschool child complete an informed consent form, a demographic data sheet, the USS for herself, and the Coddington SRRS for her preschool child. Pearson product-moment correlations were used to measure the strength of association between the preschool children' total stress score, as measured by the Coddington SRRS, and the mother's total stress score, as measured by the UUS. Multiple regression analysis was used to examine the contribution of mothers' UUS scores as well as census variables, to the prediction of the preschool children's Coddington stress scores. Results of the study clearly demonstrated an association between measures of stress in mothers and measures of stress in their preschool children at significant levels. Specific stress indices were shown to contribute significantly to total stress measures in mothers, thereby specifying types of maternal stresses that affect preschool children. Stress indices of mothers were found to be good predictive measures of stress in their preschool children, increasing in linear relationship to the Coddinfton SRRS scores. A subsidiary and very interesting finding was that as the census variables of mothers, namely age, income, and education, approached higher demographic levels, the Coddington SRRS measure of preschool children decreased, "buffering" the measure of preschool children's stress. The investigator made recommendations for further exploration on the basis of this study. |
