How Many Times Do People Usually Experience Different Kinds of Stressors Each Day?

Abstract

Understanding how frequently people experience different kinds of daily stressors is crucial for interpreting stress exposure and informing mental health care. But it can't be directly estimated from current assessment methods, such as diaries, end-of-day interviews, and ecological momentary assessments (EMA), that use sparse sampling to limit participant burden, and a structured response format for uniformity. In this paper, we utilize stressor data collected in a 100-day field study with 68 participants that adopted wearable-triggered prompts and a freeform format to solicit stressors soon after they occurred, but limited its prompts to a small subset to keep the burden low. We develop asymptotic models to estimate the latent frequency of different kinds of real-life stressors that address sample sparsity and sampling bias. We find that people experience 5.39 stressors per day, on average. The top three are related to work (1.76/day), health (0.59/day), and transportation (0.55/day). These estimates offer a principled benchmark for interpreting individual stressor loads. They can also inform mental health care treatments and interventions by establishing population-level baselines.