Work and Leisure

146 Schneider, Ainbinder, Csikszentmihalyithat stress has yet to be investigated with a methodology that is longitudinal,process-oriented, and constructed within an ipsative-normative researchdesign (Somerfield and McCrae 2000; Tennen et al. 2000). The methodscommonly used in studying stress, such as journals or time diaries, often relyon time-elapsed recall. Critics argue that these methods may erroneouslyestimate the stress levels an individual is likely to experience throughout theday.We suspect that stress is more of an ongoing experience, and that individualshave internalised coping mechanisms to deal with routine and nonroutinestressful life experiences at home and at work. This is not to say thatall individuals experience stress minimally. We do suspect that stress variesamong individuals and is likely to be associated with particular types of jobs,perceptions of work, hours worked, and family structure and dynamics.Assuming that most mothers and fathers have stress in their lives, it becomesparticularly important to examine those individuals with high levels of stresscompared to those who have lower stress levels.In this chapter, we study the stress levels of working couples at work,home and in leisure. We investigate how high and low stress mothers andfathers perceive their experiences of work and leisure as well as relationshipswith their spouse and children. To understand how stress is experiencedand how it affects others in the family, we use data obtained from the AlfredP. Sloan 500 Family Study, which includes survey information, time diarydata (i.e., the Experience Sampling Method or ESM) and intensiveinterviews.Stress: an ongoing phenomenonIn the first half of the twentieth century, stress was conceptualised primarilyas a response to adverse internal or external stimuli (Cannon 1932; Selye1952). An individual was ‘acted upon’ and responded to these actions biologicallyand psychologically. Stress was conceived as a negative force thatwas personally destructive. This perspective changed with the early work ofLazarus and his colleagues (Deese and Lazarus 1952; Lazarus and Eriksen1952; Eriksen et al. 1952; Lazarus et al. 1952) who showed that, under equallystressful circumstances, there were tremendous variations in responses tostress. These results were particularly valuable because they began to deconstructthe effects of stress, demonstrating that individuals react differently tostress-inducing experiences.Since the late 1970s, there has been a continuing interest in developingholistic theories that better encompass more of the observed complexities ofhuman behaviour (Garièpy 1995). Today, few would examine stress strictlyfrom a biological or psychological perspective. Stress is commonly viewed asdeveloping and occurring on a macrolevel (e.g., between the individual andthe environment), as well as on the microlevel (e.g., within the individual and