I saw a news report that stated 44% of Americans felt stress. It didn’t define stress. What would be the likely definition then of the stress mentioned in this poll? I know it must be a feeling of anxiety to some measure but is there a clear defintion?
It’s what I feel when I read news reports about absurdly-specific percentages (usually without error bars) of people who have some absurdly-undefined trait.
These things are almost always worthless for any actual purpose: like IQ tests, “stress” here is probably defined as “whatever this test found 44% of people to have.”
A popular alternative is the “simple miswording,” wherein the reporter took something scientifically accurate and precise–like “reported headaches with no physical cause”–and reworded it unto something less boring…and less accurate. Like stress.
Without details, we can’t be sure which of these it was (or even the vanishingly rare “properly defined and controlled study for symptoms of a specific well-defined type of stress.”)
44% seems a little low for the broad definition of stress I have in my head. I can’t imagine 56% of people report they just sail along blissfully every day.
I’m actually doing my third-year dissertation on poorly-put media questionnaires, so I can actually bring knowledge to a GQ! Probably a first for me. 
Like TimeWinder says, there’s no guarantee at all that what the news report says they’re measuring is what they’re actually measuring. A question could be “Have you felt anxious in the past?”, “Do you often feel anxious?”, “Have you ever sought help for an anxiety problem?” - and the very different results from these questions could all be used to say x number of people feel stressed. There’s really no way of knowing how the news people phrased it; they might have done the poll themselves, or be relying on a poll or study by someone else.
There isn’t a commonly accepted definition of stress that we can guess they’re using.