Outline and Evaluate Research Studies In to Life Changes and/or Daily Hassles
Holmes and Rahe conducted a study in 1967 to investigate how life changing events can affect a person’s health. They examined medical records and the history of 5,000 patients in which they then devised a list of 43 different yet significant life events that may affect a person and used a number to represent the scale of time it would take the person to readjust their life back to normal after the specified event. This study involved the SRRS or its full name of The Holmes and Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale which they devised to identify a number of items that may be classed as stressful such as marriage, law violations and death of a spouse which in this experiment was then given a score called Life Change Units (LCU’s); Holmes and Rahe believed that if a person once their score was totalled had a result over 300 they had an 80% chance of developing a serious health implication/issue in the future. Marriage had a score of 50 whilst other events such as minor violations of the law had 10 compared to death of a spouse at 100.
A constraint of this study was that the life changing events such as marriage and death of a spouse weren’t applicable to younger people and can be interpreted differently by people. For example divorce may be harder on the person if they’ve been married for a long time and have children involved whilst others may see it as a relief if it was a bad relationship and they were unhappy or even suffering abuse at the hands of their partner. A further element of this study is that although life events are correlated with stress and ill-health correlation isn’t causation and could be the result of another factor which may not have been taken in to consideration by the researchers. Furthermore, the SRRS didn’t purely include negative life events but also considered events that may be classed as positive such as taking a holiday which means relaxation and family...