Stressful events, stressors and psychological strains in young professional engineers

The majority of survey studies of occupational stress have required respondents to focus on a broad, unspecified, time period and to report on 'typical' conditions at work. The emphasis has been on chronic work stress rather than on particular stressful events occurring in a person's day-to-day work. Although life events research (Holmes and Rahe, 1967) does provide information on acute stress, it is difficult to assess how this work on stress in life generally relates to acutely stressful incidents at work. As far as the life events research is concerned, there is some suggestion from a study conducted by Konner, Coyne, Schaefer and Lazarus (1981) that life events and chronic stress have different relationships to well being and chronic stress have different relationships to well being and psychological outcomes. However, as suggested above, it is not clear how far, if at all, these findings would generalize to work-related stress. The present study was intended as an exploratory investigation of the nature and consequences of acute stressors encountered in everyday working life amongst a sample of young professional engineers. Since the study of acute work stressors is at an early stage, it seemed appropriate to use a self-report method, based largely on open-ended format items. However, in the case of strain-reactions to the stressors, Likert type measures were also employed in the study.