Life Event Questionnaires for Measuring Presumptive Stress

Abstract

Cumulative stress from the impact of life events has become an important variable in psychosomatic and psychological research. This article provides both short and long life events questionnaires that add to incidence information the remoteness or recency in time of a given experience. In the weight assignment system that leads to a single presumptive stress score, events remote in time have less influence than recent events. The reliability of weight assignment was checked in subject groups that differed by sex, age, and status. Women weighted life events as more stressful than did men; other differences in groups were less important. In spite of the sex differential, review of these data suggests use of the same weight assignments for all subgroups rather than differential weighting by sex and age. Reliability was also checked by test and retest methods: in contrast to common sense expectation, a disappointingly low level of reliability was found. The implications for investigative use of life events questionnaires are discussed.

A longitudinal study of depression, pain, and stress as predictors of sleep disturbance among women with metastatic breast cancer

“…Stressful life events-Stressful life events were measured using a 37-item checklist developed by Horowitz, Schaefer, Hiroto, Wilner and Levin (Horowitz, Schaefer, Hiroto, Wilner, & Levin, 1977). This assessment was conducted only at baseline.…”

“…Hann and colleagues (Hann et al, 1999) reported adequate internal consistency for this scale in both healthy controls (alpha=.87) and cancer patients (alpha =.89) and good test-retest reliability in both healthy controls (r= 0.51;p < 0.001) and cancer patients (r = 0.57; p < 0.001). The measure has one sleep-related item ("My sleep was restless") and is similar in this way to other depression scales (e.g., Zung Depression Inventory (Zung, 1965); BDI (Beck, 1978))Pain-In keeping with previous research in our laboratory concerning pain among women with metastatic breast cancer (e.g., Koopman, Nouriani et al, 2002;Spiegel & Bloom, 1983)), current pain was assessed using a single item from the Pain Questionnaire (Spiegel & Bloom, 1983): "Please rate your experience of pain at this moment by selecting a number from 1 "not noticeable" to 10 "excruciating -worst ever".Stressful life events-Stressful life events were measured using a 37-item checklist developed by Horowitz, Schaefer, Hiroto, Wilner and Levin (Horowitz, Schaefer, Hiroto, Wilner, & Levin, 1977). This assessment was conducted only at baseline.…”

“…Participants were asked to read a list of events (e.g., death of parent, illness, separation, divorce) and indicate whether or not each event was experienced and how long ago it was experienced, if it was. Each item was assigned a weighted score based on the level of stress associated with the particular stressor and its time frame (Horowitz et al, 1977)and the total weighted sum was used in the analysis. …”

Panel manipulation in social stress testing: The Bath Experimental Stress Test for Children (BEST-C)

“…This scale is widely used in the literature and was judged to be a good measure of life events in a review assessing its use over 30 years of research (Scully et al, 2000) and the adult version has test-retest reliability of r=.71 over a six week period (Horowitz et al, 1977). It gathers information about stressful life events that have happened in the last year such as death or divorce of parents, changes in acceptance by peers, and hospitalisation of a sibling.…”

The effects of lifestyle and type a behavior on the life-stress process

“…There have been many studies about the relationship between life events and depressive illness symptoms [22][23][24][25]. In our model, we included various other variables simultaneously; however, the relationship showed many complexity-produced interactive effects on the life-stress process.…”