HLTH 4360 Week 3 Appraisal Comparison Paper Example

One Schedule Change, Two Appraisals: Primary and Secondary Appraisal Traced in Two Warehouse Workers Given the Same Four-Day Shift Notice

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 4360: Stress Management and Wellness

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

One Schedule Change, Two Appraisals: Primary and Secondary Appraisal Traced in Two Warehouse Workers Given the Same Four-Day Shift Notice

The Framework

The transactional model of Lazarus and Folkman (1984) holds that the stress a person experiences in an encounter depends on two judgments. Primary appraisal asks what is at stake. An encounter may be judged irrelevant, benign or stressful; a stressful one is then read as harm already done, a threat of future harm or a challenge that offers a chance of gain. Secondary appraisal asks what can be done: which options for coping are available and how likely each is to work. The two judgments are not a strict sequence; each informs the other, and both can change as the encounter unfolds, which the authors call reappraisal. This paper applies those two steps to one situation faced by two people. It describes how each person appraises the situation. It does not offer either of them advice.

The Situation, Held Constant

At a composite regional distribution center, every worker on the day shift receives the same notice on a Monday in February. Beginning April 6, the shift will change from five 8-hour days, Monday to Friday, to four 10-hour days, Monday to Thursday, from 6:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Weekly hours and pay do not change. The notice states that workers may request a swap to the evening crew through a form submitted to the shift supervisor, and that requests are reviewed in order of seniority.

Two workers, Dana and Luis, both 34, have worked at the center for six years. Each picks orders on the same team, earns the same rate and has a child in a daycare center that closes at 6:00 p.m., a 25-minute drive from the warehouse. Each has a partner whose work hours end at 5:30 p.m. Each has the same seniority rank within two places. On paper, then, the demand, the timing and the formal resources are identical. Neither is described here as anxious or calm by temperament; the analysis asks only how each one appraises this notice.

Dana's Primary Appraisal

Dana reads the notice and focuses on the new end time. A 5:00 p.m. finish leaves her 60 minutes to reach a daycare that closes at 6:00, and she knows the highway exit near the center backs up after 4:30. She also knows the daycare charges a late fee of $1 a minute and that two late pickups in a month trigger a review of the family's place. What is at stake for her is the child-care arrangement itself. In Lazarus and Folkman's terms, her primary appraisal is threat: a judgment that harm has not yet occurred but is likely. She also notes a potential loss, that her Friday shifts, which she has used to cover her mother's medical appointments, will vanish into a weekday her mother's clinic does not open.

Dana's Secondary Appraisal

Dana then considers what she can do. The swap form is available to her, but she believes swaps are almost never granted, because a coworker told her that two requests were refused last year. She judges that her partner cannot leave work early. She considers asking a neighbor to collect her son but rates that option as unreliable. Her secondary appraisal is that her options are few and each is unlikely to work. The combination of high stakes and low perceived control is the pattern the transactional model associates with high stress in an encounter (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984).

Luis's Primary Appraisal

Luis reads the same notice and focuses first on the free Friday. He sees the same 5:00 p.m. finish and the same 60-minute window, and he also knows about the traffic and the late fee. He judges that pickups will be tight on four days a week, which he registers as a threat, but he also sees a gain: one full weekday without work, which he has wanted for a part-time course at a community college. His primary appraisal is therefore mixed, threat and challenge together. Lazarus and Folkman (1984) note that threat and challenge are not opposite ends of one scale and can occur in the same encounter.

Luis's Secondary Appraisal

Luis considers the same options as Dana. He has heard the same story about refused swaps, but he also knows that both refused requests came from workers with less seniority than his, so he judges that his own request has a reasonable chance. He plans to submit the form in the first week and to propose to his partner that she cover Monday pickups while he covers the rest. His secondary appraisal is that he has at least one option likely to work and a fallback if it does not.

Comparing the Two

The comparison isolates appraisal because nothing outside interpretation differs. Both workers face the same demand and have the same formal resources. The difference lies in what each attends to and in how each reads one shared piece of information, the refused swaps. Dana treats it as evidence that the option is closed; Luis treats the seniority of the refused workers as evidence that it is open to him. That is a difference in secondary appraisal, and it changes how threatening the whole notice appears.

Table 1

The Two Appraisals Side by Side

Both workers hold the same facts about refused swaps; they differ in which detail of those facts they use.

What Research Says About Such Differences

The model predicts that differences in appraisal will show up in the experience and the physiology of stress, and published work supports that prediction. In a study of 85 married couples who repeatedly described their recent stressful encounters, Folkman et al. (1986) found that what people judged to be at stake and what they judged could be done were related to how they coped and to whether they rated the encounter's outcome as satisfactory. Tomaka et al. (1993) went further in the laboratory. Participants who appraised a mental arithmetic task as a challenge, judging their resources to meet its demands, showed a different cardiovascular pattern from those who appraised it as a threat: greater cardiac response with lower vascular resistance for challenge, and higher vascular resistance for threat. Threat appraisers also reported more stress.

These studies show associations between appraisal and stress responses in their samples, the first in married couples and the second in students under laboratory conditions. They do not show that Dana's and Luis's bodies will respond in exactly these ways, and the paper does not claim that.

Reappraisal and Limits

Appraisals are not fixed. If Luis's swap request is refused, his secondary appraisal is likely to shift toward Dana's. If Dana learns how seniority decided last year's refusals, hers may shift toward his. Lazarus and Folkman (1984) treat these changes as reappraisal, part of the same process.

Two limits apply to this analysis. First, the workers are composites built to hold circumstances constant; real coworkers rarely match so closely, and in practice resources such as savings or family help would also differ. Second, appraisal is inferred here from what each person attends to and plans; in research it is usually measured with self-report scales, which carry their own error.

References

Folkman, S., Lazarus, R. S., Dunkel-Schetter, C., DeLongis, A., & Gruen, R. J. (1986). Dynamics of a stressful encounter: Cognitive appraisal, coping, and encounter outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(5), 992-1003. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.50.5.992

Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and coping. Springer.

Tomaka, J., Blascovich, J., Kelsey, R. M., & Leitten, C. L. (1993). Subjective, physiological, and behavioral effects of threat and challenge appraisal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(2), 248-260. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.2.248