University SOC 230: Critical Response Memo on Stress and Health

This critical response memo analyzes Thoits' (2010) research on stress and health, addressing the research question of how meso and macro-level interventions can mitigate stressors. The memo outlines Thoits' methods, including the use of physiological responses and social readjustment scales to measure stress. It identifies three policy implications: altering stress-creating contexts, improving predictive power of stress theory, and incorporating the cumulative advantage/disadvantage of stress. The memo evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Thoits' work, including the need for further research on neighborhood impacts and the limitations of stress theory in predicting specific outcomes. The analysis emphasizes the importance of understanding how stressors affect health inequalities and the potential for policy interventions to improve individual well-being and address structural issues. The assignment covers the impact of stressors on health and well-being, which can be reduced when persons have high levels of mastery, self-esteem, and/or social support.

Running head: SOC. ASSIGNMENT
CRITICAL RESPONSE MEMOS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1SOC. ASSIGNMENT
Research question
In the paper by Thoits (2010), the research question that is being addressed by the author
is to apprehend whether programs as well as policies on meso and macro levels of interferences
have the ability to address the fundamental settings, which put people at jeopardy of stressors.
Methods
In the paper, stressor is explained as an exposure to harmful environmental stimuli, like
electric shocks, extreme temperatures, as well as food deficiency. The author identified 3 stages
such as the alarm, resistance, and exhaustion to explain the physiological responses to harmful
events. The further linked exhaustion or the depletion of bodies defense towards stress for the
risk in hypertension. The Navy medical records were reviewed that it was seen that patient
undergo often doctor visit due to stresses. Author followed the suggestion made by Holmes and
Rahe, where 43 common event from patient chosen and were asked to rate behavioral
readjustment. It was observed from the stress data that spouse death is considered to be
behavioral readjustment. In the scale of 0 to 100 it was observed that “life change units” showed
that minor law violation can cause fewest life unit change. The author showed that with life
change increases the illness likelihood (Thoits, 2010). The social readjustment rating scale
demonstrated easy and simple way to address the stress amount in the lives of the people. Studies
have shown that stressor pile-ups have produced higher level of psychological distress and
predicted psychiatric problems causing depression, anxiety disorder and substance disorder.
Persons with greater numbers of actions did not develop distressed, whereas others with limited
events did. Associations among numbers of actions in addition to distress signs extended

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from .10 to .35 across studies, signifying that harmful events can elucidate 1 to 12 percent of the
variance in distress. Hence, proved that impacts of health for stressful events can be reduced or
buffered by other factors.
Analysis
Thoits (2010) demonstrated three directions policy-relevant work. First policies strength
is to define meso level methods to alter the stress creating contexts for people.
The major drawback of the situation showed that the individual life for real promise and
therefore more research is required for tracing the impact of the neighbourhood to the personal
experience of social isolation, lack of control and chronic strain. Further substantiate of the
utility at meso-level health causes verification of the influence of ameliorative in the
neighbourhood enhancement towards mental and physical health of the residents of the
community.
The second policy improves the predicted power and hence the relevant policy explaining
the stress theory as well as its findings that might be productive for employing accumulative
measures towards health consequences. Stress theory is assumed to be non-specific in the
outcome and hence does not tailor the onset forecast, heart failure as opposed to bipolar disorder
(Slavich, 2020. The proposition states that numerous stressors along with withdrawals in
psychosocial coping possessions resulted in any one of behavioral or emotional behaviour. It
helps to analyse outcomes separately and differentiate rather than exchangeable consequences of
the stress methods. If the outcome of the stress causing other kinds of heart diseases, then
incongruent outcomes are accumulated into a single summary for measuring of poor health
(Heath et al., 2015).

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The major drawback of second policy that it fails to summarize the programmatic or
policy involvements is a causal mechanism, which consistently associate an accretion of
stressors to an accretion of physical as well as mental health problems.
Third policy defines theoretical incorporation of cumulative advantage as well as
disadvantage proliferation of stress. The strength of this policy is to accept, along with additional
tests that interplays among structural problems such stress introduction and the deficiency of
psychosocial resources. Substantial effort has acknowledged that weaknesses compound along
with corporeal illness, incapacity, plus mortality outcomes (Karatekin & Ahluwalia, 2020).
The major weakness of this policy is, mental health exploration has proven, which
gathered stressors in addition to scarce coping resources that are associated with disadvantaged
social status to consequent psychological difficulties over the short period of time (Thoits, 2010).
The researcher has examined possessions of structural drawbacks on mental health as the
individuals grow old and have not measured flourishing stressor. It diminishes resources for
helping to presume expanded gap for the health problems result depending on social and
economic status, marital status, gender as well as ethnicity.

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References
Heath, C. L., Curtis, D. F., Fan, W., & McPherson, R. (2015). The association between parenting
stress, parenting self-efficacy, and the clinical significance of child ADHD symptom
change following behavior therapy. Child Psychiatry & Human Development, 46(1), 118-
129.
Karatekin, C., & Ahluwalia, R. (2020). Effects of adverse childhood experiences, stress, and
social support on the health of college students. Journal of interpersonal violence, 35(1-
2), 150-172.
Slavich, G. M. (2020). Social safety theory: a biologically based evolutionary perspective on life
stress, health, and behavior. Annual review of clinical psychology.
Thoits, P. A. (2010). Stress and health: Major findings and policy implications. Journal of health
and social behavior, 51(1_suppl), S41-S53.