Impact of Stress and Loneliness on Health-Related Quality of Life Among Low Income Senior African Americans
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Impact of Stress and Loneliness on Health-Related Quality of Life Among Low Income Senior African Americans Guillermo M. Wippold 1
&
Carolyn M. Tucker 2 & Julia Roncoroni 3
&
Meagan A. Henry 2
Received: 3 March 2020 / Revised: 31 August 2020 / Accepted: 7 September 2020 # W. Montague Cobb-NMA Health Institute 2020
Abstract Low income senior African Americans are at risk for low health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Loneliness may exacerbate the effects of stress on health. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of perceived stress and loneliness on the HRQoL of low income senior African Americans (N = 281). Results indicate that loneliness may exacerbate the inverse relationship of perceived stress with psychological HRQoL among this sample. Additionally, both loneliness and perceived stress were associated with poorer physical HRQoL. The present study has implications for interventions seeking to improve HRQoL among a similar sample of senior adults given that loneliness is a modifiable variable. Keywords Stress . Health-related quality of life . African American . Loneliness . Low income
African Americans experience a disproportionate amount of health disparities, which are reflected in the high rates of chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease experienced by this group [1]. These disparities leave African Americans at a high risk of experiencing low health-related quality of life (HRQoL) [2]. HRQoL is a multidimensional measure of health—consisting of an individual’s subjective appraisal of their physical and psychological functioning [3]. HRQoL is used as a measure of population health by organizations such as the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One of the advantages of using subjective measures of health (e.g., HRQoL) is that these measures of health can be better predictors of mortality and morbidity than many objective measures [4].
* Guillermo M. Wippold [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA
2
Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
3
Department of Counseling Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA
Impact of Stress on Health and HRQoL Chronic stress has been linked to numerous adverse objective and subjective health indicators, including hypertension [5], cardiovascular disease [6], and low self-rated health [7]. Additionally, chronic stress has been found to exacerbate pre-existing health conditions [8, 9]. Perceived stress is a measure of an individual’s appraisal of stress [10]. Lazarus [11, 12] posited that the impact of a stressful event is a function of the individual’s cognitive appraisal of the stressful event and the abilities of the individual to cope with the resultant stress. As is the case with objectively measured chronic stress, perceived stress strongly predicts adverse health outcomes [8, 13–16], including low HRQoL [7]. African Americans, older individu
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