The pandemic affected daily life on an unprecedented global scale resulting in the need for adaptation and flexibility to cope with ongoing stress, uncertainty, and loss that may affect couple relationships. Understanding resource loss in the context of mass stress events is critical because resource loss has been defined as the primary agent of stress (Hobfoll, 1989). As such, it is important to understand what factors may have shaped the degree of resource loss incurred during the pandemic. Extant research implies that considering early life adversity may be useful to explore as it may be a form of resource loss and is linked to poorer mental health and relational outcomes in adulthood. Furthermore, the stress sensitization hypothesis posits that childhood adversity may prime individuals to have a lower threshold for later life stress. This study utilizes both the stress sensitization hypothesis and the conservation or resources theory as lenses for understanding how childhood adversity affects pandemic-related resource loss for couples. Given that myriad resource loss was a prominent feature of the pandemic, it will be useful to understand whether childhood adversity sets individuals and couples up to experience greater loss in the context of pandemic-related stressors. Additionally, few studies have addressed the influence of mass stressors in the context of couple relationships using data from both partners. This gap in the literature is problematic because the pandemic's unique constraints and stressors were shared and lived in relationships and mental health distress tends to be interrelated among partners. This study is thus designed to examine how family of origin stress (reported at the outset of pandemic related shutdowns in the US in April 2020) associated with posttraumatic stress (PTSS) 3 months later (July 2020) to, in turn, predict variation in resource losses reported 3 months later (October 2020) associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 535 cisgender, heterosexual couples. Findings showed that individual's higher family of origin stress predicted higher levels of their own PTSS at wave 2, and higher PTSS at wave 2 predicted higher levels of couples' shared resource loss at wave 3. Additionally, family of origin stress associated with higher levels of couples' shared experience of loss via higher levels of their own PTSS.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BGMYU2/oai:scholarsarchive.byu.edu:etd-11448 |
| Date | 21 June 2023 |
| Creators | Barrow, Betsy Hughes |
| Publisher | BYU ScholarsArchive |
| Source Sets | Brigham Young University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/ |
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