Psychology
The Social Readjustment Rating Scale
The Social Readjustment Rating Scale, developed by Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe, is a tool used to measure the impact of various life events on stress levels. It assigns numerical values to different life events, such as marriage, divorce, and job changes, based on the perceived stress they cause. The total score can indicate an individual's susceptibility to stress-related health issues.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
7 Key excerpts on "The Social Readjustment Rating Scale"
eBook - PDFStress
A Brief History
- Cary Cooper, Philip J. Dewe(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
This was one of two paths that life event research was to follow: to explore the accumulated effect of a series of major life events. The other focused on the effect of single events or classes of events. The Social Readjustment Scale By the time Holmes and Rahe came to publish their Social Re-adjustment Rating Scale in 1967, the ‘‘life chart device had been used systematically with over 5000 patients to study the quality and quantity of life events empirically observed to cluster at the time of disease onset’’ (1967, p.215). From this pool of events, 43 were identified as reflecting these experiences. The life events used in the SRRS were originally used to construct a Schedule of Recent Experience (SRE). The work using the SRE (Rahe, Meyer, Smith, Kjaer, and Holmes, 1964) ‘‘had been used to adduce data STRESS: A BRIEF HISTORY 43 that the life events cluster significantly in the 2-year period preceding onset of tuberculosis, heart disease, skin disease, hernia and pregnancy’’ (Holmes and Masuda, 1974, p.57). The development of the SRRS took the SRE a stage further by de-veloping a scale reflecting the magnitude for each life event and so ‘‘provided a unique method for validation of the findings of the retrospective studies and for a quantitative definition of a life crisis’’ (Holmes and Masuda, 1974, p.57). The 43 events fell into two categories: ‘‘those indicative of the life style of the individual, and those indicative of occurrences involving the individual’’ (Holmes and Rahe, 1967, p.216, em-phasis added). These included, for example, death of a spouse, marriage, change in financial state, change to different line of work, revision of personal habits, and vacation. Interviews during the development phase of the SRRS to capture the mean-ings individuals gave to events identified one theme common to the life events. The occurrence of each was, for the individual involved, associated with, or required some form of coping be-havior (Holmes and Rahe, 1967).
eBook - ePub- Leo Goldberger, Shlomo Breznitz(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Free Press(Publisher)
In 1964, Holmes and Rahe (1967) devised the Social Readjustment Rating Questionnaire (SRRQ) to obtain numerical estimates of the average degree of life change and read-justment that subjects assign to changes in their lives. The life changes studied involved modifications of sleeping, eating, social, recreational, personal, and interpersonal habits that required or indicated varying degrees of adjustment. Holmes and Rahe subsequently revised the original scale to become The Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS), which assigned magnitudes to each of 42 life change items according to the amount, severity, and duration of adjustment each requires. The scaling instrument was found concordant among various segments of the U.S. population and between American citizens and people of other cultures.Holmes and Rahe then devised the Schedule of Recent Experience (SRE), a self-administered paper-and-pencil survey that listed life changes by year of occurrence. The current version of the SRE, the recent life changes questionnaire (RLCQ), retains the essence of the 42 original life change questions of the SRE, but the wording of questions has been altered for clarity and to allow for clarity and to allow for specific options of response. Instructions were placed at the end of the RLCQ so that subjects could self-scale their own subjective life change scores for each change they had recently experienced. Patients obtained at least three different life change scores for analyses with various illness criteria. First, subjects obtained a 6-month life change unit (LCU) score for the 42 SRE items. Second, they scored a sum of all recent life changes indicated in a 6-month time period. This method was called unit scaling and proved to be particularly useful with subjects between 18 and 25 years of age, a group that usually experiences few high LCU life changes. (The investigator is recommended to use the LCU scoring system when dealing with samples of older subjects who may have experienced more life changes such as marriage, childbirth, divorce, business readjustment, illnesses of family members, death in the family, and so on). Finally, a subjective life change unit (SLCU) score was obtained that yielded a 6-month SLCU total for the original 42 SRE life change questions; SLCU scores were then subtracted from the standard LCU scores for those 42 questions.
eBook - ePubHandbook of Psychology and Health, Volume IV
Social Psychological Aspects of Health
- Shelley E. Taylor, Jerome E. Singer, Andrew Baum, Shelley E. Taylor, Jerome E. Singer, Andrew Baum(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
An early step in the chain of research on life events was The Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS), which consists of a list of 43 events. On the SRRS, the subject was asked to rate each event for the amount of social readjustment needed to adjust to the event (Holmes & Rahe, 1967). The rating, by means of a magnitude estimation technique, was in the form of a comparison of the amount of readjustment required for each event with the amount of readjustment inherent in getting married. A further and important step in the investigation of life events was the Schedule of Recent Events (SRE) (Holmes & Masuda, 1974). The SRE consists of the list of 43 events and is used to determine which of them actually occurred in the subject’s life. The SRE yields a score consisting of the sum of what are termed Life Change Units (LCUs). This score is the sum of the products of the numbers of life events that occurred to the subject in the recent past multiplied by empirically derived values based on the SRRS research (Masuda & Holmes, 1978).Since its initial development, the SRE has been used in numerous studies designed to determine relationships between life stress and indices of health and adjustment. Retrospective and prospective studies have provided support for a relationship between SRE scores and a variety of health-related variables. Life stress has, for example, been related to sudden cardiac death (Rahe & Lind, 1971), myocardial infarction (Edwards, 1971; Theorell & Rahe, 1971), pregnancy and birth complications (Gorsuch & Key, 1974), chronic illness (Bedell, Giordani, Amour, Tavormina, & Boll, 1977; Wyler, Masuda, & Holmes, 1971) , and other major health problems such as tuberculosis, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes, and a host of less serious physical conditions (Rabkin & Struening, 1976) . Although not providing conclusive evidence, these studies have provided support for the position taken by Holmes and Masuda (1974) that life stress serves to increase overall susceptibility to illness. That is, stressful life events seem to set the stage for vulnerability to health impairment.
- Marc Smith(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
In a similar way, stress research has traditionally investigated dramatic life events and severely taxing situations. Early research highlighted the role of major life events, with Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe of the University of Washington School of Medicine introducing their Social Readjustment Rating Scale back in the 1960s (Holmes & Rahe, 1967). Life events are anything that require us to adjust to change, mainly negative events like the loss of loved one, losing our job or getting divorced, but positive events such as going on holiday or Christmas can also ramp up the stress levels and can result in both physical and psychological illness. An example of the scale can be seen in Box 3.1. Box 3.1 The Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) The SRRS is an inventory of common stressors. These stressors can be both positive and negative but all represent a change that requires the individual to adapt to environmental changes. Each life event is assigned a value, or ‘life changing unit’ that reflects the relative amount of stress the event causes. Stress is seen as cumulative, so the scale requires the individual to identify all relevant events that have taken place in the past year to estimate the total stress units. Note: Only a selection of life events are included in the table below. Life event Value Death of a spouse 100 Divorce 73 Death of a close family member 63 Marriage 50 Retirement 45 Change in financial state 38 Son or daughter leaving home 29 Begin or end school 26 Change in schools 20 Change in sleeping habits 15 (Holmes & Rahe, 1967) █ From life experiences to daily hassles All life stresses are both actual real events and subjective interpretations. Your world could be falling apart at the seams and you might display little outward signs of stress, yet on another occasion you might lose sleep because you can’t decide on new wallpaper for the living room
eBook - PDF- Nan Lin, Alfred Dean, Walter M. Ensel, Nan Lin, Alfred Dean, Walter M. Ensel(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
Both sociogenic and psychogenic interpretations of this relationship tend to emphasize the critical im-portance of the desirability of events as an explanation of this relation-ship. Life Event Schedules and Their Variations The measuroment of significant and stressful life events is beset by a peculiar contradiction. A single instrument (Holmes and Rahe, 1967) has largely served as the operational model for measuring life events for the past 20 years, while it has been simultaneously subject to severe criticism both as a measurement tool and as an operational equivalent of the stress (or) construct. The original 43-item Holmes and Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale (1967) was designed to assess the relative readjustment required in an individuaPs life resulting from a variety of life events. According to Holmes and Rahe, adjustment to life events, regardless of the desir-ability of the events, can be taken as an indicator of stress induced by the need to respond to a given event or series of events. The Holmes and Rahe scale fits a biogenic model of illness onset, developed by Meyer (Lief, 1948) and Selye (1956), in which the greater the magnitude of expected adjustment to events (life change units), the more likely that subsequent illness will be observed. The scale combines the strain and emphasis components by its use of weights to estimate the empha-sis given to particular events. The preliminary application of this scale in a variety of contexts indicated that the assessment of life-change units could be used to account for subsequent illness (Holmes and Masuda, 1974; Masuda and Holmes, 1967; Pugh, Erickson, Rubin, Gun-derson, and Rahe, 1971; Rahe, Pugh, Erickson, Gunderson, and Rubin, 1971). Other researchers have added to the basic list of events, and some have prepared lists of types of events important for special populations (Dohrenwend, Krasnoff, Ashehasy, and Dohrenwend, 1978; Meyers et al., 1972; Rahe, 1975).
eBook - ePub- Chris Irons(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
They developed a 43-item scale (The Social Readjustment Rating Scale – SRRS; Homes and Rahe, 1967), in which 43 different stressful situations (e.g. death of a spouse, losing your job, moving house) are ranked and given a score out of 100 (death of a spouse rated as the highest stressful life event at 100). Participants make a note of how many of the 43 stressful life events have occurred to them over the past year, and the scores given to each item are added together. The idea here is that higher total scores are associated with greater risk of physical illness. If you are interested in looking at this scale, a version can be found at: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTCS_82.htm. Holmes and Rahe (1967) found that higher scores on the SRRS were related to higher levels of illness (although this was quite a small statistical relationship), and subsequently, to depression (Costantini et al., 1973; Rahe, 1979). From Holmes and Rahe’s (1967) work, it was clear that whilst overall stress was important, certain types of stress were seen to be more significant or ‘stressful’. Holmes and Rahe rated the top three most stressful events as: (i) death of a spouse, (ii) divorce and (iii) marital separation. Whilst there may be a number of elements common to these events, one issue in particular seems to be important: loss. In fact, the research literature over the past three decades has supported this finding, and has highlighted that interpersonal loss – be it through death, the ending of a relationship or the perception that a relationship might be permanently ending – appears to be a powerful source of stress and closely associated with depression. As a concept, loss featured as a central part of psychodynamic theories, and to a lesser extent, cognitive theories of depression explored in the previous chapter
eBook - PDF- Rocio Fernandez-Ballesteros(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
Washington DC: American Psychiatric Press. Foa, E.B., Cashman, L., Jaycox, L. & Perry, K. (1997). The validation of a self-report measure of posttrau-matic stress disorder: the posttraumatic stress diag-nostic scale. Psychological Assessment , 9 , 445–451. Herbert, T.B. & Cohen, S. (1996). Measurement issues in research on psychosocial stress. In Kaplan, H.B. (Ed.), Psychosocial Stress (pp. 295–332). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Holmes, T.H. & Rahe, R.H. (1967). The Social Readjustment Rating Scale. Journal of Psychosomatic Research , 11 , 213–218. Horowitz, M.J., Wilner, N. & Alvarez, W. (1979). The impact of event scale: a measure of subjective stress. Psychosomatic Medicine , 41 , 209–218. Kanner, A.D., Coyne, J.C., Schaefer, C. & Lazarus, R.S. (1981). Comparison of two modes of stress measurement. Daily hassles and uplifts versus major life events. Journal of Behavioral Medicine , 4 , 1–39. Lazarus, R.S. & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. New York: Springer. Lepore, S.J. (1997). Measurement of chronic stressors. In Cohen, S., Kessler, R. & Underwood Gordon, L. (Eds.), Measuring Stress: A Guide for Health and Social Scientists (pp. 102–120). New York: Oxford University Press. Monroe, S.M. & Kelley, J.M. (1997). Measurement of stress appraisal. In Cohen, S., Kessler, R. & Underwood Gordon, L. (Eds.), Measuring Stress: A Guide for Health and Social Scientists (pp. 122–147). New York: Oxford University Press. Peacock, E.J. & Wong, P.T. (1990). The stress appraisal measure: a multidimensional approach to cognitive appraisal. Stress Medicine , 6 , 227–236. Pearlin, L.I. (1983). Role strains and personal stress. In Kaplan, H.B. (Ed.), Psychosocial Stress. Trends in Theory and Research (pp. 3–32). Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Sarason, I.G., Johnson, J.H. & Siegel, J.M. (1978). Assessing the impact of life changes: development of the life experiences survey. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology , 46 , 932–946.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
