The life events inventory: a measure of the relative severity of psycho-social stressors.

HOLMES AND RAHE [I] describe an instrument-the Schedule of Recent Experiences (S.R.E.)-which has been widely used for measuring life stresses retrospectively. It consists of a checklist of events with spaces for subjects or patients to indicate which, if any, of the events have happened to them in a stated period of time-usually the past year. Each event is assigned a weighting which is supposed to reflect the degree of disruption that would be caused should that event befall an average person. These weights are expressed in “life change units” (L.C.U.‘s); an individual’s score on the S.R.E. being the sum of the L.C.U.‘s of the events he reports having experienced. The original weights were obtained in a somewhat arbitrary fashion. Originally, samples of convenience were asked to act as judges and to assign a number between 1 and 100 to each event on the S.R.E. to indicate the amount of ‘turmoil, upheaval and social readjustment’ that would be occasioned by its occurrence. One of the items, usually Marriage was assigned an arbitrary weight of 50; the intention being that this would establish an anchoring point at the middle of the scale that would act as a common frame of reference for all judges. When judged by the criterion of interjudge agreement this procedure has been quite successful. Even when groups that vary on age, ethnicity and cultural backgrounds are used as judges, good agreement about the weights to be assigned to each event is obtained [2-71. The instrument has been shown to be reasonably reliable [5] and has been extensively used in studies of the antecedents of illness [6-121. To some extent this wide use may be more indicative of the lack of a suitable alternative measure of recent life stresses, than of the inherent quality of the S.R.E. The work reported here was undertaken to remedy what were seen as three important deficiencies that reduced the usefulness of the S.R.E. as a research tool.