The Effects of Hardiness

As hardiness is defined as the personality characteristic that allows an individual to remain optimistic and in good health after a stressful life experience, it is important to determine how this can be related to the age of an individual. As evidence of the relationship between age and hardiness comes to the forefront, it can be more easily understood how some cope with stressful life events while others find it harder to cope.

Schmied and Lawler, (1986) published a study in order to examine the impact of hardiness, Type A personality and stress on secretarial working women. Demographics of age, education, and marital status, number of children, race and religion were also taken into account, but this section will focus on only the results pertaining to age and hardiness. The sample for this study was a group of female secretaries, who were aged from twenty-one years to fifty-nine years. There were one hundred and ten questionnaires sent out, with a response rate of 74.5%, yielding a final sample of eighty-two women. Each woman was to have at least two years of college education. Hardiness was measured using the standard five questionnaires, broken down into three subcomponents of hardiness. The Alienation from Work Scale and the Alienation from Self Scale were used to measure commitment, The Security Scale was used to measure challenge, and finally The External Locus of Control Scale and The Powerlessness Scale were used to measure the control aspect of hardiness. The Score from each scale was converted to a z-score, and then summed to give a single hardiness score. The higher the score, the less hardiness one possessed for all scales. It is important to note that the challenge scale was doubled as there was only one scale ...

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...and hardiness relationship.

For future research, in addition to solely looking for a relationship between age and hardiness, it would be viable to include a sample of men as the studies presented above depict only women.

Works Cited

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and nonhardy women. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(1), 81-88. doi:

10.1037/0022-3514.56.1.81

Schmied, L.A., & Lawler, K. A. (1986). Hardiness, type a behavior, and the stress-illness

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