How do you deal with stress? Part 2: Designing Questions
[This part of the project was completed by Sarah Norman and Rumilla Uddin, in collaboration with Dr Iona Beange and Dr Pippa Thomson of The University of Edinburgh and the Community Wellbeing Collective.
This post follows on from How Do You Deal With Stress? Part 1: Selecting the question]
For this research, we want to equalise it. Not focusing specifically on marginalised people, but just including them in the data pool. – Rumilla Uddin
Dependent Life Events
Rumilla: [When it comes to the wording of Dependent Life Events] “you can’t ask people these questions in this way – it’s sensitive information, and it’s invasive and potentially triggering.
[Background information – see also part 1:
Dependent Life events are those in which the person plays an active role (NB: this does NOT mean it is their fault, it just means they are involved) e.g. divorce or redundancy.
Independent life events are things that happen to you, in which you have no direct involvement. e.g. the serious illness of a close relative.]
Talking about stress wasn’t what I needed to do to overcome it. If you do care I don’t want you to worry, and if you don’t care I don’t want you to know. – Rumilla Uddin
Information and data is stored differently, it’s not in a physical file somewhere, it could end up on the internet anywhere [so I don’t want to talk about it].
So we know that we don’t want to be asking leading questions, or questions that make people delve deeply into traumatic memories that they may not be comfortable reliving or sharing with others.
Framing the questions around “stress” rather than “trauma” helps to keep it accessible, and potentially lighter, while still being open enough to include trauma if that’s what participants would like to share. It allows them to participate in exactly the way and depth that they feel comfortable with.
Our Questions:
After much deliberation and discussion, we settled on a 3 part question for this pilot:
What makes you stressed?
Where do you understand your stress to be?
How do you deal with stress?
Short and long term stress
We hope to explore the ideas of short and long term stress.
A “short term” stressor can have long term consequences – for example a short term lie from someone you trust could cause long term confusion, doubt and impact on relationships with others. So is it really a short term stressor? Where does a short term stressor end and a long term one begin, where’s the line? We’d like to see how people define that for themselves.
Engaging people to explore their experiences
Our main aim should be to ask the people, where do YOU experience it, and where do YOU group it – short or long term/ everyday or life stress. We ask how they think things group into these categories, and perhaps even allow them to identify what they feel these categories look like and define them themselves.
How do we define long term/life events – is it your increased likelihood of mental illness, as in current research or just something that affects who you are today? This would be a more social model of mental illness: it’s not that you’re ill, it’s that you’ve experienced something that affects you today.
By allowing our participants to help define terms and shape the research alongside us, we actively involve them in creating a bottom-up approach to mental health research far from the prescriptive approaches that we are used to.
We aim to find and amplify voices of people who have previously been disregarded and neglected in mental health research to empower them to have a direct hand in how it is carried out.
Related Blog Posts
How Do You Deal With Stress? Part 1: Selecting the question
How do you deal with stress? Part 3: Researcher Feedback & Pilot
