A systematic review of the ecological and longitudinal methods to study daily stress

The objective was to review the methods used to assess daily stress, focusing on the types records used, as well as the methods used to describe daily stressors, the ways to operationally define stress, and the different research approaches. A search for quantitative research articles published between January 2008 and December 2017 was carried out on indexed entries of four electronic databases. Of the 254 publications found in the search after duplicates were removed, eft 57 articles were selected to analyse. A large diversity of recording methods was detected, a single daily record for a week being the most frequently used. The different ways to operationalize stress highlight the different implicit definitions of stress: the number or intensity of stressful event refers to stress as an external factor, negative feelings refer to the individual's responses, and reactivity or "pile-up" are related to the process by which stress develops over time. Such variation suggests that stress is not a precise concept that can be assessed by a single measure, stress is rather a generic label for the complex process of adaptation to specific situations. The first one is that it can be concluded that stress is a process that explains the short- and long-term effects of exposure to stressors on health and wellbeing through a complex chain of mediators and moderators. The second point is that although it is known that the changes produced in stressful situations are adaptive at first, studies of the negative side of stress prevail. And the third point is that the studies analysed were not reduced to the analysis of the stress process or of any particular aspect of stress but rather, the evaluation of daily stress served to study other processes with marked social and affective components.