What can occupational stress diaries achieve that questionnaires can't?
| Date | 14 August 2007 |
| Published date | 14 August 2007 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480710773990 |
| Pages | 684-700 |
| Author | Gail P. Clarkson,Gerard P. Hodgkinson |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
What can occupational stress
diaries achieve that
questionnaires can’t?
Gail P. Clarkson and Gerard P. Hodgkinson
ESRC/EPSRC Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM) and
Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Abstract
Purpose – The paper aims to demonstrate the efficacy of the qualitative occupational stress diary as
a means by which to attain additional depth of insight into the way people experience stress, to foster
individual reflection and self-assessment, and as an aid to the development of context sensitive
interventions.
Design/methodology/approach – Using a free response format, a critical incident diary was
completed by 15 clerical workers, employed in a higher education organisation, over five consecutive
working days.
Findings – The factors constituting causes and consequences of occupational stress were cognitively
framed differently from one day to the next and it is unlikely that these insights would have been
attained had we employed a series of preformed quantitative response scales. The diary facilitated
self-reflection and was reported to have cathartic qualities.
Research implications/limitations – There is a need for context specific, tailored intervention
measures. Accumulation of corroborating descriptions of how people respond to specific stressors will
contribute to the development of such measures. The work reported now needs to be extended to larger
groups and over longer periods to identify the most frequently used coping strategies, and which are
most efficacious in a given situation.
Practical implications – The qualitative occupational stress diary is a simple but powerful
self-reflective tool, which may lead to therapeutic outcomes.
Originality/value – A growing number of researchers are critical of the practical influence of
quantitative measures of occupational stress and coping. The study illustrates how the qualitative
occupational stress diary might usefully complement traditional methods for research and
intervention purposes.
Keywords Stress,Higher education, Service industries,Conditions of employment,Qualitative research
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Over the past 40 years or so, evidence has steadily accumulated showing that
work-related stress not only causes high levels of sickness related absence but also
contributes to a high turnover of staff and reduced performance in organisations (e.g.
Briner and Reynolds, 1999; Cartwright and Cooper, 1997; CIPD, 2002; Cooper and
Marshall, 1976; Daniels and Harris, 2000; Jex, 1998; Smith et al., 2000). Stress and the
related conditions of depression and anxiety accounted for an estimated 12.8 million
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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The financial support of the UK ESRC/EPSRC Advanced Institute of Management Research
(AIM) in the preparation of this article (under grant number RES-331-25-0028) is gratefully
acknowledged.
PR
36,5
684
Received October 2005
Revised May 2005
Accepted June 2006
Personnel Review
Vol. 36 No. 5, 2007
pp. 684-700
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/00483480710773990
working days lost in the UK in 2004/2005 alone, and the financial costs to business and
industry have been well documented (for details see Health & Safety Executive, 2005).
A plethora of quantitative measures have been devised for the assessment of job
stressors (or strain manifestations), for example the Job-Related Strain Index (Indik et al.,
1964) and Maslach’s Burnout Inventory (Maslach and Jackson, 1986). Increasingly,
context specific instruments, such as the teacher-specific measures by Cooper (1995) and
Fimian (1984), are being devised. Many scholars have pointed out that no matter how
appropriate these general and context specific measures are to a given work environment,
it does not necessarily follow that the occupational stressors identified will be experienced
as stressful by any given individual (e.g. Fineman and Payne, 1981; Firth, 1985). In
response, researchers have sought to develop more comprehensive instruments, which
incorporate a range of stress and outcome scale items, together with many moderator
variables, for example the Pressure Management Indicator (PMI) (Williams and Cooper,
1998) and its forerunner the Occupational Stress Indicator (OSI) (Cooper et al., 1988).
There is no question that the psychometric tradition has laid important foundations for
the advancement of our understanding of the nature, causes and consequences of stress in
the workplace (for a recent review of work in this tradition see Hart and Cooper, 2001).
However, there have been a number of calls to extend the repertoire of methods for the
investigation of occupational stress (e.g. Newton et al., 1993; Schabracq and Cooper, 1998;
Zapf et al., 1996). This reflects a growing recognition that the changing nature of work
organisations and jobs demands approaches that take us beyond the quantification of
extant categories of the causes, consequences and coping mechanisms if we are to devise
interventions that have practical applicability in contemporary work settings (Burke,
2002; Coyne and Racioppo, 2000). Moreover, researchers are increasingly agreed that it is
the cognitive appraisal of workplace situations and events that is the crucial factor in
determining their stressfulness rather than their objective nature (e.g. Daniels et al., 2002,
2004; Folkman and Moskowitz, 2004; Lazarus, 1999).
For all of the above reasons, over the past decade there have been a number of calls
for more attention to be devoted to qualitative methods, with a view to capturing a
potentially wider range of causes and manifestations of stress and individual coping
strategies (e.g. Alford et al., 2005; Dewe, 2001; Newton et al., 1993; Schabracq and
Cooper, 1998; Summers et al., 1995). The diary is one technique that has the potentia l to
meet this requirement.
The diary method has long been advocated for the qualitative investigation of
occupational stress and well-being (Fisher, 1984, 1988; Newton, 1989). However, while
the diary method has been employed effectively in several recent studies of
occupational stress and well-being (e.g. Daniels and Harris, 2005; Fuller et al., 2003;
Harris and Daniels, 2005; Harris et al., 2003; Totterdell and Holman, 2003) it has been
largely used in a highly quantitative fashion, essentially little different in form from
traditional questionnaires (for a notable exception see Alford et al., 2005). As with any
method, there are inevitable tradeoffs to be made and in this case this relates to the
degree to which the diary should be constructed, i.e. allowing participants the freedom
to record their responses in a free flowing format or highly structured for the
quantification of the extent to which respondents agree or disagree with preformed
item statements. Gains in quantitative rigour per se are necessarily attained at the
expense of depth of insight. However, the latter is arguably the fundamental promise of
the diary method.
Occupational
stress diaries
685
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