Life Event Questionnaires for Measuring Presumptive Stress

Abstract

Both short and long life event questionnaires that add to incidence information on the remoteness or recency in time of a given experience were investigated. In the weight assignment system that leads to a single presumptive stress score, remote events had 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, use of the same weight assignments for all subgroups rather than differential weighting by sex and age was indicated. Reliability was also checked by test and retest methods; a low level of reliability was found.