Sociological Study of Stress Process : An Empirical Test of Pearlin Among Secondary School Students of Mazandaran Proviance

Many sociological studies in the area of stress have been due to the classic article of Pearlin (1981).The conceptual model presented in this paper has affected the sociological research of the last three decades and is a kind of reference model applied to research on mental health disparities.

The research was conducted the survey method. By using the stratified sampling, cluster sampling and systematic sampling, the number of 742 people was chosen as the sample size. The population of the study is all students of secondary school of Mazandaran province (2018-19).The date for this survey are collected by questionnaire and analyzed by SPSS and LISREL.

The results indicate that the highest levels of stress (primary and secondary) that students have experienced is associated with the component of deprivation & underreward and structural constraints. Also, the highest amount of chronic stress is related to the element of threats and Deprivation & underreward. From other research results, moderating variables have an effective role in moderating the relationship between stress and outcome (depression and anxiety) that have been significant. In explaining depression and anxiety: students in public and Magnet schools are more likely to be subject to stress sources that threaten their depression and anxiety.

The aim of sociological studies is to explain the relationship between social status and mental disorder; and the focus of these studies is the classical literature of Pearlin (1981) that describes the main elements of the stress process model. Each of the aforementioned model elements has been highly studied in recent years and has different sub - sections; this paper explores the detailed descriptions of its elements in response to the question that due to the stress process model (Sources, Moderator, Manifestation, and Social Context), the mental health differences can be identified. Generally, the most important positive aspect of the social stress process approach is its preventative property as the stress process model is a vehicle for explaining mental health differences and in other words, these models explain the differences in a meaningful way.