Читать книгу The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology - Группа авторов - Страница 37

Leonard Pearlin (1989) is known for the stress process model and his initial paper on this topic is the most cited paper in medical sociology. He states that stress involves a demanding situation whose experience of it is perceived as threatening or burdensome. In his view, stress originates in situations, yet what is also important is how people react to it in the context of their lives. This meant there is much more to stress research than simply looking at how people respond to certain stressors but also the social circumstances of stressed people. Pearlin maintained that the stress process consists of three components: (1) stressors, which he defines as any condition having the potential to arouse the adaptive capacity of the individual; (2) moderators, which consist of coping abilities, sense of mastery, and sources of social support; and (3) outcomes, the health effects of the distress experienced by the person. He identified two major types of social stressors: life events and chronic strain. The theory holds that not all people react to these stressors the same way because of differences in stress moderators which, in turn, influence different outcomes. The merit of Pearlin’s stress process model is that it links the experience of stress directly to patterns of social stratification through its depiction of the origins of stress, its mediators, and outcomes.