case study 3

Aims and context:Understanding that things happen that we need to adjest to/this causes stress/the more things that happen the more adjustments therefor the more stress/based on hans selyes research in 1930/he suggested a causal link between pschological stress and physical illness/holmes and hawkins observed that infectious illlness such as TB was more common amoung poorer people due to emotional effects of poverty/to carry out a prospective study of a normal population and see if there was a relationship betwee

Procedures:2664 male naval and marine officers/used opportunity sampling/range of backgrounds with a mean age of 22.3/taken from 3 ships 2 in vietnam one in the med/filled out 4 questionaires every 6 months for 2 years before going to sea/one on the boat/was the military version of the SRE/pen and paper provided as it was a self admin questionaire/each question given a LCU score related to stress levels/health records were checked after tour of duty.

Findings and conclusions:hoped to find a correlation between LCU's and illness during the tour/no correlation 2 years prior to tour but 6 months proir weak positive correlation/very weak correlation though 0.118/probability of results being due to chance less than 1%/support the idea of a relationship between prior life events and current illness/correlation strongest in cruise ships 1+3 in vietnam and weakest in the 1 in the med/members split into groups of ten(decile groups)based on TLCU's/10% with the lowest TLCU in decile 1 and so on/compared and shown significant difference in illness score between lower and higher decile groups/1&2 deciles represented a low illness group(1.4 illness score)/9&10 deciles high illness group(2.0 illness score)/TLCU bettere predicted illness in older sailors(over 21) and married sailors/because more serious life change events will happen in these groups.

Methodology:longitudinal study(one that is done over a long period of time).Pros;more reliable results/insight is stronger and has more depth.Cons;datat can be lost if people drop out(around 10%)/collecting the datat for that long can be very time consuming.Correlational study(one that tries to establish a causal relationship between 2 variables).Pros;can be useful to help people/can be applied to real life.Cons;there is more allowance for confounding variable to affect results and therefor reliability of the study.Sample(2664 males mean age 22.3).Pros;easily accessible requiring little effort.Cons;can not be generalised to real life.Ethics:Informed consent;pp gave consent but was not well informed as they didnt know studies nature.Right to withdraw;ppt unaware of true nature of study so did not know they had right to withdraw.Debreifing;can assume that sailors were effectivley and fully debreifed however the 10% of sailors transferred were not debreifed.

Alternative evidence:Arthur(1972);similar Rahe study using naval aviators who spent 6 months on combat missions to vietnam/found a positive correlation between life events prior to tour and illness/supports rahe that life changes increase illness/suffers from same method set backs as rahe.Cohen(1993) carried out experiment into causal link between SRRS levels and illness/ppt fill in SRRS/half were given nasal drops containing flu virus/half given nasal drops with placebo/ppt then monitored for the next 7 days/ppt with higher event scores were more likely to be infected with cold virus/supports link between life events and illness.Lazarus(1990);not major life change events but everyday hassels cause illness/found there was a stronger correlation for 75 married couples between everyday hassel and illess(0.59 correlation co-efficient) than major life change events/supports link between stressful life events and illness however events do not have to be major as measured by SRRS.