[The long-term Alpendorf study. Paradigm for the study of long-acting psychosocial stressors].

The follow-up study Alpendorf is presented as a paradigm for the observation of long-acting psycho-social stressors. Stressors can be observed directly or we infer to their existence from the observation of indicators of stress. There are methodological difficulties in differentiating stressors, indicators of stress and indicators of coping processes within a social field. The reductionist approach, which eliminates variables, is useful in the laboratory situation, it has, however, to be discarded in the investigations of a social field. Rapid social change in a mountain village of the Swiss Alps radically transformed the socio-economic basis and the socio-cultural super-structure, thus producing a field of stressors, leading to stress, observable on the level of the population. The amount of stress can be measured indirectly by the existence of indicators of stress: consumption of alcohol, alcoholism, psychosomatic symptoms and syndrome, consumption of drugs and tobacco, incidence and prevalence of neurotic and psychotic disorders, criminality.