Welcome to NSDE

The NSDE is one of the in-depth studies that are part of the MacAuthur Foundation National Survey of Midlife in the United States (MIDUS). The purpose of the NSDE is to examine the day-to-day lives, particularly the daily stressful experiences, of a subsample of 1484 MIDUS respondents who completed short telephone interviews on each of eight consecutive nights. Thus, the data set is comprised of 10,389 daily interviews.

Although previous daily diary research has advanced our understanding of daily stress processes, there are important limitations to these prior studies that are being addressed in the NSDE. First, previous studies in this area relied on small and often unrepresentative samples that limit the generalizability of findings. For this reason, the NSDE uses a large national sample of adults in the United States. Second, previous studies of individual differences in exposure and reactivity to daily stressors have typically examined only one source of variability, such as neuroticism, to the exclusion of others. The NSDE corrects this problem by utilizing the data collected in the larger MacArthur baseline survey on a wide array of personality variables in combination with the sociodemographic characteristics of respondents to study the determinants of exposure and reactivity to daily stressors. Third, previous studies typically have relied on self-administered checklists of daily stressors that only assess the occurrence of stressors. The NSDE uses a semi-structured telephone interview instrument that measures quantitative (e.g., frequency) and qualitative (e.g., type, severity) aspects of daily stressors. Fourth, previous studies have failed to investigate the role of genetics in both exposure and reactivity to daily stressors. The NSDE has a subsample of 242 identical and fraternal same-sex twin pairs to explore how genes and environment interact to determine how individuals adapt to day-to-day stressful experiences.

Grants and contracts from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Aging, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to carry out the data collection and analysis of this project.

For information regarding the NSDE, contact David Almeida, Principal Investigator (dalmeida@psu.edu)