Life, change, and stress. Holmes, T.H., and Rahe, R.H.(1967). The Essay

Life, change, and stress. Holmes, T.H., and Rahe, R.H.(1967). The social readjustment rating scale. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 11, 213-218 - Essay Example A list of life events commonly viewed as stressful was rated by subject based on the amount of stress they think it produced. Stress was described as a change from one’s stable state, so raters may interpret it as either positive or negative, as long as it produced a degree of adaptation, change or coping. This scale was named Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS). This scale was used by many researches to link life stress with the probability or existence of illness in a person. However, such psychosomatic illnesses were argued to also be caused by other factors such as one’s experience with a stressful event, coping skills, the strength of one’s physiological system, how one deals with an illness when it occurs, Sudden, negative events that an individual has no control of were found out to be more predictive of illness than positive controllable life changes. The SRRS has helped in many researches to determine this finding. However, this common-sensical result has put the SRRS in question as to its reliability and validity in predicting illness from stress. One criticism is that it does not take into account a person’s interpretation of a particular event. An example may be one’s interpretation of retirement. Person A may view it as a loss of a career, or being put ‘on the shelf’, while Person B may view it as the ultimate highlight of a fulfilling career because it spells the end of a lifetime of hard work. To rectify this, some researchers suggest that the SRRS would be more accurate if it would allow an individual to rate the event on some measure of severity in accordance to his own interpretation. Cohen, Kamarck and Mermelstein developed such a scale and call ed it the Perceived Stress Scale. Nevertheless, many studies still rely on the SRRS in studies with stress. The authors claim that the balance of negative and