African American Health: The Consequences of Stress

Submitted by Corina Campbell, Special reporter for Fierce411.com

Have you ever considered how stress, anxiety and even depression affect your attitude towards violence? How about how men and woman are affected by stress, anxiety and depression differently? No? This topic was surly on the mind of Dr. Sung Joon Jang, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Baylor University. He recently revealed some interesting new facts in the September edition of Justice Quarterly about how strain and its emotional consequences, such as anxiety and depression, affect African Americans and how gender plays a significant role in coping with strain.

Jang’s study focused on testing Robert Agnew’s general strain theory. Agnews’s theory asserts strain generates negative emotions that provide motivation for deviant acts, including crime, as a coping strategy. Jang’s study, which he titled “Gender Differences in Strain, Negative Emotions and Coping Behaviors: A General Strain Theory Approach,” analyzed this approach by studying African American men and women.

Jang worked independently to critically analyze the interviewed responses he obtained from the Inter-University Consortium for Political Social Research (ICPSR). ICPSR describes its mission as an organization “of member institutions working together to acquire and preserve social science data, provide open and equitable access to these data and promote effective data use.” The initial study consisted of the responses from African Americans between the years of 1976 to 1992, and was based on the national distribution of African Americas indicated in the 1970 Census. The study participants were surveyed repeatedly four times. The individuals were initially interviewed in 1976 and then followed up with three additional surveys taken in 1988 and 1992. Jang explained that the 1970 Census was the most recent U.S. when the first study was conducted. During the initial 1976 interview, participants were interviewed face to face and then followed up with phone interviews. The 1976 interview brought about the largest number of participants and was the primary focus of Jang’s study. “While the most recent survey was in 1992 there were limited responses. So, I decided to analyze the wave of data collected from the largest number of survey participants,” Jang explained.

Now at this point you may be wondering why the response of African Americans in the 1970’s concerning strain are relevant today. While the thirty year period may seen long, Jang believes no drastic change has occurred in the way strain affects the lives of African Americans since the survey was conducted. Jang admits that there must have been some changes since the survey was conducted, but he does not believe the old data set has no relevance to the present time. “The relevant questions is whether the fundamentals changed between 1976 and 2007,” said Jang, “I doubt new data, if collected this year, would result in totally different findings. I’m sure there would be some differences, but overall I doubt there would be a drastic difference in the new data as long as scientific sampling design were used like the survey data I analyzed.” he continued.

The far bigger issue in this case is the unique information that Jang was able to generate from analyzing this sampling. Jang’s focus on studying these individuals was to apply the general strain theory and its concept of why some people commit crime and deviance as a result of experiencing bad things. The strain theory proposes that strain causes individuals to experience negative emotions such as anger, depression and anxiety. “The stain theory suggests these negative emotions cause people to engage in crime and deviance to cope with not only strain but also foster negative emotions,” explained Jang.

The male and female perspectives to strain are quite different, particularly in the case of African Americans. While African American women were more likely to report strains related to physical health, interpersonal relations, gender roles in the family, they are less likely to mention work-related, racial as well as job strain than African American men. Jang also found that African American women were less likely than African American men to turn to deviant coping strategies when they experience strain. Jang hypothesized that this may be attributed to the fact that African American women are more likely to experience self-directed emotions, such as depression and anxiety, which in turn were less likely to lead to deviant coping behaviors than other-directed, angry emotion.

This hypothesis is consistent with national statistics that report that while men engage in higher rates of violence and crime, woman report higher level of negative emotions. “The fact that studies tend to report that woman experience higher levels of anger, depression and anxiety than men but men are more violent, creates a paradox,” Jang said. He became interested in studying the inconsistency and came up with an explanation for why woman experience higher levels of strain and negative emotions, but men, not women, have higher rates of crime and deviance, including violence.

Jang proposed “African American women are less likely than African American men to turn to deviant coping strategies, whether other-directed (i.e., fighting and arguing with other people) or self-directed (i.e., drinking alcohol or getting high in other ways), when they experienced strain partly because their strains were more likely to generate self-directed emotions (i.e., depression and anxiety), which in turn were less likely to lead to deviant coping behaviors than other-directed, angry emotion,” Jang explained. Jang’s interpretation of this data is that the differences in coping with strain exist because of the differences in the nature of negative emotions experienced by the two genders. “African American women tend to internalize their strain and negative emotions, whereas African American men externalize them.”
When asked why Jang felt that this particular study was worth pursuit, the response came quite easy. “The study was worth pursuing not only because it is an interesting paradox, but also because the study findings have practical implications. For example, I see religious involvement as another explanation to this paradox. Specifically, I found religious involvement as a helping tool to cope with strain and negative emotions in a conventional, instrumental, or, at least, non-deviant manner. In this study, I found African American women tend to be more religious than men, and my findings indicate that this partly explains why woman are less likely to be deviant than men,” he said.

Thus this study has various practical applications for everyday life. “No one is immune from life’s strain, no matter who you are, now and then you feel angry and anxiety,” Jang said. He points that the difference is in how you choose to respond. “There are ways to manage negative emotions instead of pouring out negative emotions onto others. Religious involvement has shown to have positive social influence in dealing with negative emotions,” Jang proposed. Jang would like to further this line of research with a follow up study on how bad things may cause some people to do good things. I think we will all be anxious to hear the findings from this future study.