Stress, Illness Behavior, and the Sick Role

seek medical care. The concept of behavior is introduced and the relative effects of stress and the tendency to adopt the sick role upon frequency of medical visits made by 614 male freshmen are investigated. Results indicate that the tendency to adopt the sick role is the more powerful variable. The significance of this social-psychological variable is discussed in relation to future etiological studies of stress and illness. THE research reported here is concerned with the relative influence of stress as compared with the tendency to adopt the sick role upon the frequency of known illness. It was undertaken to resolve some questions posed by research purporting to find a direct relationship between stress and in general, i.e., regardless of specific diagnosis. Hinkle and Wolff,' for example, studied the long-term patterns of health and illness among 2934 employees of a large organization which had maintained excellent medical records for its personnel. They found that, over long periods of time, the frequency of known illnesses (including the more com