Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1998

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Psychology

Major Professor

Kathleen A. Lawler

Committee Members

Warren Jones, John Lounsbury, Sandra Thomas

Abstract

The influence of Hardiness on the stress-illness relationship among a biracial sample of low socioeconomic status women was investigated, and the importance of John Henryisra, community stress, and network stress to illness also were studied. Total family income, at or below the poverty line (as established by the United States Department of Health and Human Services) determined inclusion of women in the study. Participants were asked to complete the Social Readjustment Rating Scale for events that occurred in the preceding 12 months in order to assess stress. Hardiness was measured with the Dispositional Resilience Scale, and the John Henryism Active Coping Scale was the measure of John Henryism. Community stress was assessed with three subscales, including the fear scale, the social problem scale, and the violent crime scale. As a measure of network stress, participants were asked to identify events on the Social Readjustment Rating Scale that had happened during the immediately preceding 12 month period to someone important to them. The dependent variable was illness that had occurred within the 12 month period immediately preceding the dates of the study. Illness was measured with the Seriousness of Illness Rating Scale. The results indicated that highly stressed women with low hardiness scores had higher levels of illness than women with high scores on hardiness, a finding consistent with the assumption that hardiness buffers the effects of stress on illness. In addition, differential correlation analysis showed that the difference between the correlation coefficients for low and high hardy, highly stressed women was significant at the .05 level. These results were supported by the regression analysis, which showed a hardiness*stress interaction that was significant at alpha .05. Within race examination of hardiness moderation effects revealed that highly stressed Caucasian American women with scores above the median hardiness score had lower levels of illness than Caucasian women with low scores on hardiness; However, this was not the case for African American high hardy women. John Henryism was not found to influence illness in the total sample; however, the regression analysis showed a .John Henryism*stress interaction that was significant at the .05 level of significance. Racial differences relative to the experience of violence in one's neighborhood were significant; on average, African American low-income women encountered more episodes of violence in the communities were they lived. The results provided evidence that hardiness buffers stress and that this moderation effect extends to low-income women.

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