Culture: A Fundamental Context for the Stress and Coping Paradigm

Abstract

The field of stress and coping emerged more than three decades ago from the recognition of the dynamic interaction between person and environment (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Moos, 2002). Over the years, researchers developed a system of objectifying and quantifying people’s environment, such as counting the number of major life events or daily hassles that occurred in the past month. Unfortunately, this system of measuring the environment resulted in acontextualizing the stress and coping research paradigm as it does not give much consideration to the meaning of the events that occur in an idiosyncratic life context. In recent years, the field has been trying to introduce more realism to stress and coping research, as the acontextual research of the last two decades yielded few solid findings that made a difference in people’s lives (Somerfield & McCrae, 2000). One of the most important neglected contexts is culture. We believe that culture is a fundamental context that helps to shape both the individual and the environment. There have been growing efforts to examine cross-cultural variations in stress and coping, but these efforts are fragmented and primarily descriptive, and usually lack an overarching conceptual framework. The aim of our overview is to help shape future research to address the generalizability of current models of stress and coping across cultural and ethnic groups. Here we describe a conceptual framework based on Moos’ transactional model (1984; 2002) that encompasses the role of culture in stress and coping. Using this conceptual framework, we illustrate how culture serves as a pervasive context for the stress and coping paradigm, and present some empirical evidence on this issue. We conclude by addressing several key issues and assumptions of the current stress and coping paradigm that may have contributed to conceptual confusion and slowed the progress of cross-cultural investigations, and we offer ways to solve these problems.