Inventorying stressful life events as risk factors for psychopathology: Toward resolution of the problem of intracategory variability.

Abstract

An explosion of research on life events has occurred since the publication of the Holmes and Rahe checklist in 1967. Despite criticism, especially of their use in research on psychopathology, such economical inventories have remained dominant. Most of the problems of reliability and validity with traditional inventories can be traced to the intracategory variability of actual events reported in their broad checklist categories. The purposes of this review are, first, to examine how this problem has been addressed within the tradition of economical checklist approaches; second, to determine how it has been dealt with by far less widely used and far less economical labor-intensive interview and narrative-rating approaches; and, third, to assess the prospects for relatively economical, as well as reliable and valid, solutions. Keywordsstressful life events; checklist inventories; intracategory variability; narrative-rating methods; psychopathology Almost four decades ago, Holmes and Rahe (1967) published a checklist of 43 events, such as death of a spouse, divorce, fired at work, and sex difficulties, called the Schedule of Recent Experiences (SRE). Its purpose was to inventory "fundamentally important environmental incidents" (Meyer, 1951, p. 53) that were found (in analyses of patients' charts) to frequently precede illness onsets. Stressful events were defined as occurrences that were likely to bring about readjustment-requiring changes in people's usual activities. A magnitude estimation procedure was used by panels of judges to assign Life Change Unit (LCU) scores to each of the 43 events on the list (Holmes & Rahe, 1967). A summation of these scores on events occurring in a given, usually quite recent, period of time was taken as the indicator of amount of stress. The checklist can be answered in either a self-administered questionnaire or an interview.Since the publication of this economical measurement procedure, the SRE, a tremendous increase has occurred in the construction of such measures and in quantitative research on relations between inventoried life events and health. For example, a search of the terms life events, life change, stressful life events, and life stress (or a combination of these terms) using PsycINFO (http://www.apa.org/psycinfo) shows an increasing rate of publications on these topics, from 292 in the decade of 1967 to 1976, to 2,126 in 1977 to 1986, to 4,269 in 1987 to Breslau, 2002;Brown & Harris, 1989;Dohrenwend & Dohrenwend, 1974;Grant, Compas, Thurm, McMahon, & Gipson, 2004;Gunderson & Rahe, 1974;Paykel, 1974;Rahe & Arthur, 1978 Tor, 1998). The common characteristic of these traditional checklists for research, whether focusing on usual situations or extreme situations, is that they consist of rather broad categories of events (e.g., divorce) rather than detailed descriptions of individual events (e.g., a divorce after a period of marital conflict over the infidelity of one's spouse).Although the emphasis has usually been on recent events in relatively brief interva...

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