Stress and health behaviour over the life course

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Abstract

Recent work emphasizes a “natural alliance” of stress and life course perspectives with both childhood and adult stress exposure having consequences over the life course. Research in this tradition is primarily concerned with mental and physical health outcomes and views health behaviour as a possible mechanism linking stress to health. This chapter emphasizes the importance of merging stress and life course perspectives to elaborate on the impact of stress on health behaviour. Stress may lead to coping responses that involve health behaviours (e.g., smoking, drinking, or eating excessively) and the impact of stress on health behaviour may vary in magnitude, or even direction, at different points in the life course. We develop a theoretically driven model to guide research on stress and health behaviour over the life course and present growth curve results from national data to test some of the theoretical premises.

Section snippets

Stress and Health Behaviour

Some behaviours, such as smoking, are harmful to health while others, such as exercise, may promote health. A number of health behaviours, including smoking, alcohol consumption, exercise, and overeating (reflected in overweight/obesity status), are associated with morbidity, disability, and mortality (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2000). A great deal of research has been devoted to identifying the social and psychological factors – including stress – that are associated with

Data and sample

We analyse data from four waves of the Americans’ Changing Lives (ACL) Study, a national panel survey conducted in the United States. Our analytic subsample is comprised of the 3,497 respondents who were either non-Hispanic White or African American. Data were collected at four time points – in 1986, 1989, 1994, and 2001. We use Full Information Maximum Likelihood (FIML) methods (provided by MPLUS) to impute missing values due to survey attrition or missing data. The assumption of MAR (missing

Stress Burden

Average levels of adult stress burden decline over time (b=−0.017, p<0.01) in the sample as a whole, although any particular individual in the sample may have experienced an increase or decrease (or fluctuations up and down) in adult stress burden over the study period. We find evidence for fluctuation in an unconditional growth curve model (not presented here) that reveals substantial variation in the random intercept (var=0.446, p<0.001) and modest variation in the random slope (var=0.003, p

Discussion

Certainly, both positive and negative health behaviours have a cumulative effect on health over the life course. In fact, Rowe and Kahn argue that, “the role of aging per se  has often been overstated and that a major component of many age-associated declines can be explained in terms of life style, habits, diet, and an array of psychosocial factors extrinsic to the aging process” (Rowe & Kahn, 1987, p. 143; also see Mirowsky & Ross, 1998). Increasing public health concerns about health

Acknowledgment

This research was supported by Grant #RO1 AGO26613 from the National Institute on Aging (Principle Investigator, Debra Umberson).

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