In today’s Best of the Web, James Taranto notes this NY Times article on stress. There are some fun tips on striking back at things that annoy onesself, but here’s the sociologically interesting bit:
Some groups are more frustrated than others. In 2002, Harris Interactive, a market research group based in Rochester, conducted a phone survey called the Daily Hassle Scale that asked 1,010 people to rank the aggravations they faced in a typical day. The survey found that poor people and African-Americans suffer the most stress from the everyday annoyances such as noisy neighbors, telemarketers and pressure at work, but it did not explain why.
Well, no, surveys generally don’t tend to say “why”, but “what”. That’s inherent in the nature of the process. (And surveys that try to determine “why” are generally recognized as the least reliable, because people lie to survey-takers, and they lie more about this kind of question.)
But there is a very plausible reason why it might be that “poor people and African-Americans” show up as suffering the most stress from causes that affect everyone: perhaps it’s because in the “poor [] and African-American[]” cultures in America (or, given income-to-race correlations, perhaps just in the “poor” culture – there is no information in the article on how the survey’s data was correlated or normalized), there is a cultural acceptance of complaint that doesn’t exist in other parts of the overall American culture. Certainly, minorities, women and poor people are given (in media and other societal institutions, anyway) all kinds of excuses and tolerance for behaviors that would be seen as unseemly or even malicious in other groups (say, white males).
It might be not that “poor people and African-Americans” suffer more, but that they complain more openly about those things from which they suffer.
Hmm…it occurs to me that the written word often blurs subtleties of meaning and intent, and that I should clarify something. I put “poor people and African-Americans” in quotes above not as a condescension or sarcasm, but because the article doesn’t given enough information to determine if that is a valid description of the group portrayed or a liberty taken by the article’s author.
