The Assessment of Life Change Stress: A Comparative and Methodological Inquiry

Abstract

A comprehensive life events questionnaire was administered to 416 men. Total life change scores were computed from published normative weights and from individuals' own ratings of events that occurred. The results showed that the rank order of life events was highly correlated between our sample and the original normative groups. However, in the population of men we studied, there were significant differences between the total life event scores derived by summing the published normative weights and the total adjustment or distress reported by those men who experienced the events. Other results indicated that life event scores based on normative weights reflect more on the number of life events that are experienced, whereas life change scores based on individuals' ratings may better reflect on the potential impact of life change. Finally, the psychometric properties of several life change inventories are poor.

Measuring stress in the mildly intellectually handicapped: The factorial structure of the subjective stress scale

“…It is true that none of the solutions accounted for a very large portion of the variance, but this is to be expected in scales where one of the response options includes a "not experienced" category. The differing "popularity" of the items is quite typical of daily hassles scales generally where the number of items rated as stressful by individual subjects tends to fall somewhere between 3 and 12 (Hurst, Jenkins, & Rose, 1978). The important feature of the SSS is that it contains items which are relevant to the population of interest and presents them in such a way that they can be understood by people with intellectual disabilities.…”

Validation of the lifestress inventory for people with a mild intellectual disability

“…The problems of factor extraction are exacerbated in the present case by the question format of the LI which employs five distinct response categories, the first one indicating that the stressor was not experienced. The very large proportion of reponses in this category is typical of stress scales (Hurst, Jenkins, & Rose, 1978) but creates extreme skewness for most variables. In fact, this type of question format generates what are known as censored data and there are routines for normalising scores on the variables concerned.…”

Six Months Post Myocardial Infarction Depression: Is Acute PTSD a Predisposing Condition?

“…Life events stress scale (LESS) [3]: This inventory is a modified French and English version of the Life Events Stress Scale [26]. The adapted version is a list of ten potential traumatic event experienced in the last six months and their consequential level of stress on the patient.…”

“…Among the consequences following an MI, depression has been recognized has one of the most critical psychological issues [1][2][3][4]. Not only is it a frequent disorder, with studies reporting prevalence as high as 40% [5], but its presence in the months following an MI is associated with adverse complications.…”