HARDINESS IN NURSES: RELATION TO STRESS, SOCIAL SUPPORT, COPING, AND ILLNESS (ILLNESS RESISTANCE).
Contributors: City University of New York.
Published: 1989
Number of pages: 212
Subjects: Psychology, Personality.; Psychology, Social.; Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: Recent advances in our understanding of the relationship between stress and illness owe much to the emergence of a psychosocial approach to the study of individuals' susceptibility to illness. Kobasa's model of stress resistance proposes that hardiness, personality constellation consisting of three attributes, challenge, commitment, and control, is paramount in protecting individuals from becoming ill under stress. Little is known, however, whether all three personality characteristics are needed and what mechanisms may underlie stress resistance. A difficulty in assessing the effects of the individual hardiness components arises from certain measurement properties of the hardiness questionnaire, most notably the substantial correlation between the commitment and control scales.

A study was designed to develop an instrument containing empirically distinct measures of challenge, commitment, and control and to determine whether the relationship between environmental stress, hardiness, social support, coping, and health were consistent with Kobasa's theoretical formulation. A new measure of hardiness incorporating aspects of commitment and control relevant to stress resistance in women was piloted and subsequently revised. The revised version of the hardiness questionnaire was administered to a sample of community health nurses in a prospective-longitudinal study. Factor analyses performed on baseline (N = 386) and three month follow-up data (N = 286) provided support for empirically distinct factors corresponding in content to commitment, control, and challenge.

Research participants also completed measures of social desirability, major life events, network stressors, transformational-like coping, social support, mental strain, and physical illness. Major life events and network stressors exerted a significant adverse effect on health outcomes. No stress buffering effects for the hardiness composite nor any of the components were obtained. Individual components of hardiness that were found to exert positive main effects on health included commitment and internal locus of control--an effect which was significant even after controlling for social desirability. Commitment was found to exert a positive effect on health through coping. The results were interpreted in relation to Existential Personality Theory and its application to stress resistance in women. The significance of the present investigation and its implications for the conceptualization and measurement of hardiness are discussed.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-02, Section: B, page: 1028.

Thesis (PH.D.)--CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, 1989.

School code: 0046.