Women's daily physical health symptoms and stressful experiences across adulthood

Abstract

This study investigated the extent to which the experience of daily stressors was related to women's age and daily health symptomology, such as flu and cold symptoms. Respondents were 562 women (aged 25–74) who were a part of the National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE), a telephone diary study examining daily stressful events. The respondents were interviewed by telephone on eight consecutive nights, which resulted in a total of 3978 days of information analysed. Overall, women had at least one physical symptom on 59% of the study days and at least one daily stressor on 40% of the study days. Results from a series of ANOVAs showed that young and middle-aged women reported more frequent physical symptoms than did the older women. This age pattern was similar to the incidence of daily stressful experiences. Furthermore, daily stressors, specifically interpersonal tensions, were shown to significantly mediate the age–symptom relationship. These findings suggest that women who are exposed to events that threaten their interpersonal relationships are at a greater risk for symptoms of ill-health.

Keywords:

• Women
• adulthood
• psychosocial factors
• stress
• daily health symptoms

Acknowledgment

This project was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Midlife Development and grants from the National Institute on Aging (AG19239) and the National Institute of Mental Health (MH53372). The authors are grateful to Amy Chandler, Amy Cox, Dan McDonald, and Michelle Neiss.

Notes

Sobel's Formula provides an approximate significance test for the indirect effect of the predictor variable on the criterion variable, via the mediator. The formula provides a method for calculating the standard error of the indirect effect. The standard error then serves as the denominator in the following t ratio:

where the numerator represents the indirect effect between the predictor variable and the criterion variable; where a = the path estimate for the path from the predictor variable to the mediator; S_a  = the standard error for a; b = the path estimate for the path from the mediator to the criterion variable; and S_b  = the standard error for b. The numerator therefore represents the estimated indirect effect between the predictor variable and the criterion variable, the denominator represents the standard error of the path.

The mediation analyses were also conducted with age as a continuous variable. Consistent with the model where age was a categorical variable, the results of the model testing for mediation by any stressors were significant; that is, the age differences in physical symptoms were reduced to non-significance when stressor exposure was added. The model testing for mediation by specific stressor types also indicated a significant effect of interpersonal tensions (similar to the model with categorical age groups). Because the results of the continuous and categorical analyses were similar, the categorical analyses are presented for ease of interpretation purposes.