Life changes as stressors
- Created by: z_mills1
- Created on: 15-05-14 11:01
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- Life changes as stressors
- events that require a significant adjustment in a person's life (e.g. divorce)
- a significant source of stress
- Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS)
- developed by Holmes and Rahe to be able to test the idea that life changes are related to stress-related illnesses e.g. depression
- SRRS is based on 43 life events taken from an analysis of over 5000 patient records
- scores for individual life events were totalled and averaged to produce a LCU for each event e.g. marriage = 50
- Research into sources of stress (Rahe et al.)
- 2500 male american sailors were given SRRS to measure life events experienced over the previous 6 months
- total score on SRRS was recorded for each paricipant
- during their 6month tour of duty a record was kept of any illness
- they found a small positive correlation of +0.18 between life change scores and illness scores
- positive correlation indicated that there was a meaningful relationship between LCUs and health - as LCUs increased so did the frequency of illness
- experiencing life events increases the chance of stress-related health breakdown
- EVAL - sample restricted to US navy personnel - reduces validity of study and difficult to generalise to population
- Evaluation of life changes approach
- individual differences - the scale's values for different events are arbitrary and will vary from person to person
- causality - relationship between SRRS score and health is correlational, tells us nothing about causality
- SRRS does not distinguish +ve from -ve because the model assumes that any life change is stressul
- events that require a significant adjustment in a person's life (e.g. divorce)
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