“Measuring stress is a critical element for designing effective stress‐reduction interventions. Finding the right instrument is a crucial part of this process.” This is the opening paragraph of the introduction to Evaluating Stress. The difficulty in finding the right instrument led the editors, a psychologist and a librarian, to produce this book. A total of 21 instruments are described by people involved in the development of the method. For each of these, information is provided on the history, the underlying assumptions, research, conditions for its use, benefits and limitations, research references and operational references. The contents page is laid out as a table so, for example, application of the various instruments can easily be compared without the need to rummage through each chapter to find the relevant comments. The book ends with an annotated bibliography covering references and critical comment that the developers of the instruments have not included in their chapters. There are name and subject indexes.
This is obviously an extremely useful compendium of information. The main market will be organizations providing stress‐reduction programmes, either in‐house or as contractors. All but two of the instruments have been developed in the USA; one of the others is Canadian and the other, the Nurse Stress Index, is English. This will limit its use outside North America.
