How Women Office Workers Deal with Stress

Abstract

A most important aspect of the lives of people in industrialized countries is their workplace. Up until now, relatively few studies have looked beyond the physical causes of illnesses and taken work factors into account as conditions which have an important influence on lifestyles and the handling of stress (Greif et al. 1983; House 1981; Folkman and Lazarus 1980; Menaghan and Merves 1983; Pearlin and Schooler 1978). While at the beginning social scientists only studied how people coped with extreme forms of stress and the effects these had on health (life event research), in the past decade everyday chronic stresses have also attracted the attention of research. The model of a “psychosocial immune system” (Antonovsky 1979; Badura 1983; Cassel 1976) thus takes into account the demands of everyday life as well as ways and means of reducing stress in its description of how illness develops. Both immunity from, and susceptibility to, stress are dependent on how stressful situations are handled.