life events

• a life event is something that people go through in the course of their life

  includes things such as

  • marriage - divorce
  • kids
  • moving house
• HOLMES and RAHE - created a way to measure life changes

  43 life events were taken from 5000 patient records

  scores for individual life events were totalled and averaged to produce a life change unit for each event
• cons - individual differences - can be subjective as what is stressful for one person might not be for another
• cons - cannot predict a cause and effect relationship - only a correlational analysis
• cons - validity and reliability of peoples memory of past events are to be questioned
• pros - used a large sample so able to get a wide range of results
• cons - use of self report - social desirability bias - may lie