Evaluation

• Evaluation of study by Rahe

  -Individual differences: people perceive life changes differently. Someone could see divorce as a positive thing but someone else may see it as a negative thing, its dependent on the situation.

  -Bias sample: beta bias as only uses male samples so can't be generalised to females.

  -Correlational: only investigated a link between life changes and illness so cannot establish a cause and effect relationship.
• Evaluation of life changes

  -A health and social support study in Finland studied 16,000 adult PP who did not have asthma at the start of the study. The researcher found that a high level of life changes reliably predicted the onset of asthma.

  -Suggests that stressful life changes can contribute to the onset of chronic illness.

  -Large sample size of 16,000n so increases generalisability.
• Evaluation of life changes:

  Daily hassles are better indicator of stress:

  -There were few life changes in this study. Almost of the PP experienced wither one or no life changes in the 5 year study period. This raises the possibility that some other stressful events may have been partly responsible for the asthma onset.

  -Lazarus argues that daily hassles are better predictors of stress, these are the minor daily inconveniences that we experience.
• Evaluation of life changes

  Individual differences

  -Life changes do not affect everyone in the same way. E.g stress of moving house may depend on the reason why someone is moving.

  -Research found a link between life changes and heart attacks. Found heart attacks could only be a predicted when subjective interpretations of the life changes were taken into account.

  -Life changes as an explanation for stress lacks validity.
• Evaluation of life changes

  Correlational:

  -Research into life changes and stress is correlational and a cause and effect relationship cannot be established. May be because of confounding variables like poor diet or health conditions.