This book attempts to map the influence of early stressful experiences on later life outcomes, studying the trajectories of stressors over the life course. It examines the ramifications of stressful events at key life course transition points, and explores the diversity of outcomes for individuals who have suffered through trauma. Finally, the book suggests new methods for study of stress and adversity through the life course, where issues of timing, ordering, and sequencing of stressors are crucial.

In 1981, Leonard Pearlin and his colleagues published an article that would ra- cally shift the sociological study of mental health from an emphasis on psychiatric disorder to a focus on social structure and its consequences for stress and psyc- logical distress. Pearlin et al. (1981) proposed a deceptively simple conceptual model that has now influenced sociological inquiry for almost three decades. With his characteristic penchant for reconsidering and elaborating his own ideas, Pearlin has revisited the stress process model periodically over the years (Pearlin 1989, 1999; Pearlin et al. 2005; Pearlin and Skaff 1996). One of the consequences of this continued theoretical elaboration of the stress process has been the development of a sociological model of stress that embraces the complexity of social life. Another consequence is that the stress process has continued to stimulate a host of empirical investigations in the sociology of mental health. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that the stress process paradigm has been primarily responsible for the growth and sustenance of sociological research on stress and mental health. Pearlin et al. (1981) described the core elements of the stress process in a brief paragraph: The process of social stress can be seen as combining three major conceptual domains: the sources of stress, the mediators of stress, and the manifestations of stress. Each of these extended domains subsumes a variety of subparts that have been intensively studied in recent years.

Although stress occurs at every stage of life, much research studies its effects over short-term periods, typically within circumscribed life stages. Little attention has been given to the possibilities that the consequences or impact of stress depend critically on the timing in the life course in which the individual is exposed to the stress, and that the sequence of prior stressors acts as a context for these effects. This book attempts to map the influence of early stressful experiences on later life outcomes, studying the trajectories of stressors over the life course. It examines the ramifications of stressful events at key life-course transition points, and explores the diversity of outcomes for individuals who have suffered through trauma. Finally, the book suggests methods for study of stress and adversity through the life course, where issues of timing, ordering and sequencing of stressors are crucial.

This comprehensive text introduces regression, the general linear model, structural equation modeling, the hierarchical linear model, growth curve models, panel data, and event history models, and includes discussion of published implementations of each technique showing how it was used to address substantive and interesting research questions. It takes a step-by-step approach in the presentation of each topic, using mathematical derivations where necessary, but primarily emphasizing how the methods involved can be implemented, are used in addressing representative substantive problems than span a number of disciplines, and can be interpreted in words. The book demonstrates the analyses in STATA and SAS. Generalizing the Regression Model provides students with a bridge from the classroom to actual research practice and application.