Stress is in the eye of the beholder: reconceptualizing the measurement of carer burden.

The development of community care policy and the inadequacies of professional responses to the needs of informal carers were described in an earlier paper. A qualitative analysis of carers' replies to a questionnaire survey demonstrated that the most potent stressors, contrary to what has previously been assumed, were linked more to subjective perceptions of events or circumstances than to the objective features of the events and circumstances themselves. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of data from the same survey which confirm the impressions gained from the analysis of the qualitative data. These findings prompt a reconceptualization of carer burden within a transactional model of stress, which is then considered as a basis for understanding how carers adapt to stress in their lives. Practice implications are assessed.