The present study addresses three limitations of prior research on the association between stress and health. First, the assessment of stressors has been limited in prior research on race, stress, and health, with an emphasis on measures of life events and a neglect of chronic stressors. Life events are important but incomplete measures of stress and underestimate the full health effects of stressors (Thoits 2010). Second, much prior work on the social distribution of stress examines one type of stressor at a time, or uses a simple additive count of stressors (Turner et al., 2006). Stressors often co-occur such that approaches that examine individual stressors may overestimate the effect of any given stressor (Green et al., 2010). In addition, a summary additive count of stressors obscures racial differences in exposure to individual stressors and conceals which specific stressors affect health. Third, many previous studies on racial differences in stress exposure do not adjust for SES (Hatch and Dohrenwend, 2007); this makes it challenging to interpret the findings, because SES may be a determinant of both stress exposures and health. Adjustment for SES can provide valuable information about the unique role of stress in the development of health disparities.
