The Meanings of Stress

Abstract

The concept of meaning plays a central role in major conceptualizations of the stress process, yet it remains underanalyzed by sociologists. In this article, the author proposes a series of research questions that place meaning construction at the center of the stress process. The questions are motivated by a review of limitations of prior approaches to analyzing meaning: appraisals, narrative ratings, social context, and respondents’ personal meanings. These approaches use meaning to improve the prediction of stress outcomes but neglect their social origins. Two new lines of research on meaning are proposed to address this limitation: the structural and cultural origins of meaning and the process of meaning negotiation. These lines of research broaden the view of the “social” in social stress research and allow a more comprehensive understanding of the processes through which social arrangements affect personal distress.