Stress - Life Changes Flashcards
Define ‘Life Changes’
Major events that alter someone’s life to the point where they have to change or readjust.
What is the SRRS and who developed it?
Social Readjustment Ratings Scale - it measures life changes and how much an individual has had to socially readjust to cope with the life change.
Developed by Holmes and Rahe (1967)
What are the basic premises of the impact of life changes on stress levels and health?
- Changes in life situations has impact
- Change involves stress - even positive changes can cause stress
- Stress negatively affects health
How was the SRRS constructed?
- based on 43 life events taken from the analysis of 5000 patient records of those suffering from stress
- 400 volunteers then ‘scored’ the events in terms of the impact that each had on 100 point scale - they used Marriage as a baseline 50pts
- If the event was seen to take more time to adjust to the score was given more than 50pts
- The scores were then totalled and averaged to produce the ‘Life Changing Units’ for each event.
What are LCU?
Life Changing Units - the measure of impact int he Social Readjustments Ratings Scale
Key Study - Rahe et al (1970) Navy staff - what were the aims?
To try to establish whether or not stress has an impact on illness
Key Study - Rahe et al (1970) Navy staff - what were the procedures?
- approx 2500 Us Navy staff - all men with average age of 22.3 years
- used SRE (schedule of recent experiences) - a military version of the SRSS
- Assessed life events every 6 months for 2 years leading up to a deployment on one of 3 ships - this gave an LCU score
- This gave controlled conditions (same food, weather, absence from family etc) which reduced the number of variables that could impact upon stress levels
- The number of illnesses (Illness score) were also recorded over their time on the ships
- It was a double blind study. Neither naval staff or medical staff knew what the study was for, eliminating possibility of demand characteristics
Key Study - Rahe et al (1970) Navy staff - what were the findings?
- They used the LCU scores to place people into bands 1-10 in terms of ‘stress levels’
- band 1 (low stress/LCU) had a mean illness rating of 1.434
- band 10 (highest stress/LCU) had a mean illness rating of 2.049 - almost double
- the correlation between LCU and illness scores was positive (0.118)
Key Study - Rahe et al (1970) Navy staff - what were the conclusions?
- The significant difference was seen in the last 6 months leading upto the deployment (suggesting that as deployment got closer stress levels increased which impacted upon health)
- the relationship between illness and LCU scores before departure were not easy to establish as ‘on board’ events that caused stress could influence illness.
- the link between LCU score and illness was stronger in older men and married men (possibly due to family ties)
Key Study - Rahe et al (1970) Navy staff - STRENGTHS
- controlled environment, reducing the number of extraneous variables
- large sample size
- low population validity (hard to generalise to whole population as these were predominantly fit and healthy men in the navy)
- androcentric (men only)
- double blindness of study reduced demand characteristics
Key Study - Rahe et al (1970) Navy staff - WEAKNESSES
- some studies have shown that daily hassles and uplifts have more impact than life events (Delongis et al, 1982)
- younger men were unlikely to have experienced a number of life events
- study was correlational which can only ‘suggest’ a link rather than prove it. There could be other factors that influence stress levels such as the events during the missions
