Life Cycle Stage and Length of Residence as Determinants of Residential Stress

Abstract

<p> Residential stress is a key concept within residential mobility studies. Considerable research, in the past, has been devoted to the task of actually measuring, and quantifying residential stress. </p> <p> Many factors which affect residential stress have been outlined, however, the absolute effect of these factors, and their relative strengths are not known. Many suggest that this is mainly due to the fact that previous research designs have not provided adequate control over extraneous variance, there by preventing the isolation of the effects of individual factors. </p> <p> The body of literature in residential mobility studies exhibits this apparent lack of methodological rigidity through the occurrence of certain inconsistencies in the literature. An example of such an inconsistency deals with the relationship between length of residence and residential stress. studies have been done which actually support the "cumulative inertia hypothesis", that is stress decreases with increasing length of residence, while others have provided evidence for the "cumulative stress hypothesis", that is, stress increases with increasing length of residence. </p> <p> The present study is designed around the recognition of the need to develop and implement a methodology that would alleviate the seemingly contradictory findings presented in the mobility literature. The problem being addressed is to establish the separate and joint effects of life cycle stage and length of residence on residential stress, these being two factors identified in past studies as potentially important determinants of stress. The main findings of the study were that both life cycle stage, and length of residence have significant separate effects on residential stress. Also, when length of residence was introduced as a covariate with life cycle stage in an analysis of covariance, the variation in stress explained by life cycle stage decreased substantially, with length of residence having the greater predictive power. </p>