COVID-19-related stress response among adult females: Relevance of sociodemographics, health-related behaviors and COVID-19 contact

Abstract

Women were more affected than men during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to investigate COVID-19-related stress response in adult women and its association with the relevant socioeconomic, lifestyle and COVID-19-related factors. This research was carried out in eight randomly chosen cities from September 2020 to October 2021. To examine stress, we distributed the COVID Stress Scales (CSS) and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). Women also fulfilled a general socio-epidemiologic questionnaire. The study included 1,264 women. Most women were healthy, highly educated, employed, married, nonsmokers who consumed alcohol. The average total CSS score suggested a relatively low COVID-19 related stress), while 1.7% of women had CSS ≥ 100. The mean PSS was around the mid-point value of the scale. Older women, who were not in a relationship, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink alcohol, but used immune boosters, had chronic illnesses and reported losing money during the pandemic had higher CSS scores. A higher level of stress was also experienced by women exposed to the intense reporting about COVID-19, had contact with COVID-19 positive people or took care of COVID-19 positive family members. In this sample of predominantly highly educated women few women experienced very high stress level, probably due to the study timing (after the initial wave) when the pandemic saw attenuated stress levels. To relieve women from stress, structural organization and planning in terms of health care delivery, offsetting economic losses, controlled information dissemination and psychological support for women are needed.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• demographic data
• health-behaviors
• stress response
• women

Author contributions

MM, TG, BJ and JD designed the study, analyzed obtained data and interpreted the results and contributed to manuscript writing. NR, MM, VN, SR, DB and MC collected the data, performed the literature review and contributed to manuscript writing. JS, DL, ZSR and JSF performed a senior supervision of the research and a critical revision of the manuscript. All authors approved the submitted manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The anonymized data will be held by the research team. Data are available for researchers on request from corresponding author.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.