Investigators soon realized that, although sig- nificant and consistent, the relationship between events and outcomes was only weak to modest in strength (Thoits 1983). Many people with high numbers of events did not become ill or distressed, while others with few events did. Correlations between numbers of events and distress symptoms ranged from .10 to .35 across studies, indicating
that negative events explained only 1 to 12 percent of the variance in distress. This observation sug- gested that the health impacts of stressful events were being buffered or reduced by other factors. Many investigators turned their attention to psy- chological and social variables that might moder- ate the effects of stress experiences on health outcomes (described below under finding 5). Other researchers reasoned that the weak to modest link between negative events and health outcomes was because there were important types of stressful experiences that were not captured by checklists of life changes (e.g., Turner, Wheaton, and Lloyd 1995; Wheaton 1999). More comprehensive meas- urement of stressors might help to explain the higher rates of illness, injury, disability, mortality, psychological distress, and psychiatric disorder found in lower-status, disadvantaged social groups in the population (Dohrenwend and Dohrenwend 1974; Pearlin 1999; Turner et al. 1995), differences which are sociologists’ main concern. In what fol- lows, I focus on findings from sociological work that (1) included multiple types of stressors, (2) described the distributions of stressors across soci- odemographic groups, and (3) examined the degree to which stressful experiences account for health differences by gender, age, race-ethnicity, marital status, and socioeconomic status. Five major find- ings emerge from these lines of research, each with its own policy implications.