Evaluation points for Stress

As requested, I've done some evaluation points for stress. They aren't the only ones, so if you think of any more, feel free to use those. 

Causes of Stress

• You could evaluate the extent to which each of these were nomothetic - does everybody have lack of control/work/daily hassles/life events? Does it cause each person stress?
• You could look at situational versus dispositional - all of these actually tend to favour situational explanations of stress, but the treatments tend to be dispositional, so this could be a good issue to look into. 
• You could maybe also look at how simple these causes would be to fix, and how the knowledge that they cause stress could be use. This leads you to evaluation issues such as usefulness and application. 

Measures of Stress

• Validity is a major issue here. You've got low construct validity in that it's hard to define stress and thus hard to know when you're measuring it, as well as face validity because the measures of stress can be affected by lying, memory, demand characteristics, illness, emotion, etc. Also, different people experience stress differently so using only one measure on participants may not be a valid approach.
• Reliability is also important. As different people experience stress differently, measures are unlikely to give consistent results if used again in similar situations. Too many things affect measures of stress and stress itself in order to give consistent results on physiological or self-report measures.
• Reductionism is a potential issue. Obviously, measures which are only self-report (e.g. SRRS) or only physiological (e.g. heart rate monitor) are reductionist and don't look at many features of stress response or the dynamic between them, whilst combined measures are holistic and thus may be more appropriate and useful.

Managing Stress

• Situational versus dispositional is also appropriate to evaluate here. Social support takes the situational approach whilst cognition is dispositional, as is behaviourism (biofeedback). Though, behaviourist ways of managing stress emphasise the role of positive reinforcement, so it has a situational element as well. You could obviously link this to reductionism and holism. 
• You could look at whether symptoms or causes of stress are targeted, and evaluate whether this is a good approach to managing stress. SIT attempts to prevent stress as well as help the individual overcome their current stress which Meichenbaum suggests is the actual cause of stress, thus it targets causes rather than symptoms. Biofeedback treats the symptoms of stress response rather than the causes as it teaches relaxation, though this may prevent stress too. Social support targets the symptoms and causes in that having strong social networks can provide support to prevent stress, and provide support once stress has onset. 
• You could also look at effectiveness by looking at whether research supports it, or by cost and time effectiveness. Biofeedback in the form of EMG machines are expensive and require a practitioner, it's somewhat difficult and expensive to get a therapist but once you've learned the skills it lasts a long time, and social support is free and lasts a long time, but is not instantaneous. 

Also, some of the studies are pretty unethical, such as Geer and Maisel, and those which put participants on waiting lists rather than giving them therapy. Though control groups help with internal validity checks, they aren't the most ethical. E.g. Meichenbaum's study had a control group of students who did worse on their exams than the experimental groups - if they were in the other group, they'd have benefited and thus they lost out. 

Reliability of Measures of Stress (Part B)

June 2011 - (b) Assess the reliability of methods of measuring stress (15)

Firstly, define the key terms in your introduction and outline the methods. You might also want to list some of the issues surrounding reliability.

"Stress is the body's response to when physical or perceived demands on an individual do not match their perceived or actual abilities to deal with a situation. It can manifest itself both physiologically and psychologically, and thus the most common approaches to measuring stress are physiological measures such as GSR, and self-report measures such as the Holmes and Rahe SRRS. However, the reliability of these measures is questionable, because of the changeable nature of stress, issues surrounding bias and standardisation, and confounding variables which mean that measures of stress may not always produce consistent results when the measure is replicated."

There's a lot of ways you could tackle the main body, such as doing one paragraph on internal reliability and one on external reliability, or going through different issues, but I prefer to go through measure by measure, and assessing each one's reliability. For example:

"One prominent measure of stress is the self-report method, which involves asking individuals to record either their stressors, such as their hassles and uplifts, or stress responses, as in the Bradburn Morale Scale. Whilst self-report appears to be an appropriate measures of psychological stress responses as it asks them about how they feel and what has bothered them, it is affected by many confounding variables that mean it's often not reliable. For example, two people may actually have the same number of hassles and uplifts, but individual differences such as the extent to which dishonesty, their mood, their memory, social desirability bias or interpretation affects their responses may result in them self-reporting different numbers of hassles. Thus, the measure may lack both internal and external reliability as well as internal validity for this reason. However, not all self-report methods lack reliability, and those with checklists or which ask closed questions may give more consistent results. For example, Holmes and Rahe's Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) involves a checklist, which is standardised and consists of the same life events. There is very little interpretation involved in answering the checklists which removes this confounding variable, and as stressors are listed in front of the individuals, poor memory is also less likely to affect the results. Thus, the measure is likely consistent over time, but may still have poor internal reliability due to the impact of mood and bias. Self-report measures are therefore variable in their reliability."

This paragraph includes examples, and a number of factors affecting reliability including standardisation, mood and subjectivitiy. It gives both strengths and weaknesses of the measure, thus fulfilling the "assess" part of the question, too. The result of my answer would consist of:

>> an assessment of physiological measures. I'd include objectivity as a strength, and that it's less affected by the user, but then say it's reliability is damaged by the fact that everybody experiences stress differently - some get headaches, some get muscle tension, others have increased heart rates, some do not experience it very much in terms of biology but their concentration lapses, etc. Also, different factors affect the physiological measures, such as in Geer and Maisel's study, GSR may not have merely measured stress response but other emotional responses, such as fear arousal or shock, and that heart rates as a measure can be affected by general health condition and exercise as well as weight, fitness, etc. 

>>briefly mention combined approach as seen in Johansson. Likely to share strengths and weaknesses of both, but may cancel out the influence of individual differences in terms of stress responses. 

>>Conclusion: both are replicable and thus should have external reliability, though stress is variable and thus the extent to which any measure can be considered to be consistent is questionable as it relies on a large number of variables to be controlled. 

Studies to use for "Causes of Stress" and "Measuring Stress"

The number of studies is one of the more daunting aspects of A2 psychology.

Some areas, though, allow you to use the same study for different areas, which can make quite a big difference to you. A couple less studies gives you more time to revise the rest, so it could be pretty useful. 

One area you can do this for is Stress. The causes of stress (work, hassles and lack of control)  studies obviously measure stress, so you can use these studies and their measuring technique for the second part of the subtopic.

Here's the studies I use:

Johansson (work as well as combined approach)
Kanner et al (hassles/life events as well as self-report measures)
Geer and Maisel (lack of control and physiological measures)