Outline and Evaluate Research Into the Stressful Impacts of Life Changes. [12 Marks]

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One research that looked into the stressful impacts of life changes was conducted by Holmes and Rahe (1967) who developed the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) for identifying major stressful life events; the scale measures the degree of adjustment needed every time a life event happens. They asked 394 people to rate 43 different life changes and score them and the stressful life events were awarded a Life Change Unit (LCU) averaging out how traumatic it was felt to be by a large sample of participants. For example death of a spouse was considering extremely traumatic and given a stress value of 100 compared to a holiday like Christmas which was given stress value of 12. By adding up the total LCUs accumulated over the past year, we are able to identify what this means. A score of 0-149 is considered a relatively low amount of life change and therefore a low susceptibility to stress related illnesses. Whereas a score over 300 indicates a major crisis and increases the illness risk by 50%. A main disadvantage of the study is the nature of the SRRS scale itself. For example the scale does not take into account individual differences as different people construct different life event scales. An example of this would be with divorce as it is appraised differently by different parties and therefore we cannot fully decide the severity of these with which these stressful conditions are perceived as they differ from person to person. Another disadvantage is that as the uses correlation, even though it may establish a relationship between life changes and impacts on heath, it does not establish cause and effect. For example there may be another factor involved that causes an impact on health like people who experience life changes may also be more likely to engage in alcohol consumption, which may in fact be the cause of impacts on heath. Therefore this does not
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