Life course trajectories of chronic financial strain and acute stress reactivity: Steeling in response to recovery from strain.

The steeling hypothesis suggests experiencing moderate strain may improve an individual's ability to cope with future strain, whereas crisis theory suggests that experiencing temporary strain will reduce the effect of future strain. The current study improves on past research by utilizing data from two independent prospective panel studies (one of 553 white rural Midwesterner women and 451 men and one of 624 African American women) spanning 26 and 22 years, respectively. We utilize growth mixture modeling to identify latent groups based on trajectories of financial strain and test interactions between class membership and later acute stressful events on chronic illness and physical health using three subscales from the RAND SF-12. We find being a group that experienced a period of temporary strain weakened the effect of later acute stressors on physical health for both samples and chronic illness for the African American sample. Results support crisis theory and highlight the importance of considering chronic strain as a life course process.