Familial Patterns of Stress. Measurement of Stressors

Measurement of Stressors. The psychiatrist Adolf Meyer was the first modern practitioner in the 1950s to suggest that life events relate to psychopathology, developing a life chart system for recording the temporal relationships of life experiences and disorder.

This method was developed further in the 1960s by Holmes and Rahe, with a questionnaire based on a summation of the quantity of environmental change in a given period in terms of a list of items representing both normative and nonnormative changes such as moving one’s residence or bereavement.

The approach was then revolutionized in the 1970s both in psychiatry (by Paykel) and in social science (by Brown) by measuring the contextual threat or unpleasantness of events in more detail and by using more sophisticated assessment techniques to incorporate meaning into experience.

This involved attending to the characteristics of events (such as whether they were undesirable or involved losses, entrances, or exits) by taking the context of the event into account when assessing its likely unpleasantness, by examining the duration of the stressor (i.e., both chronic and acute), and finally by having the researcher assess the severity of the event according to benchmarked examples to circumvent the biases raised by self-report.

Relevant context is crucial; for example, in the case of a pregnancy it is necessary to collect factual details of the experience including whether it was planned, the state of the marriage/partnership, the health of the individuals, and their financial and housing situation in order to assess its negative and potentially depressogenic characteristics.

Although more attention was paid to life events because of their clear dating in relation to disorder, a role for chronic stressors or difficulties was also found. These involved problematic situations that continued over time and that frequently generated new events, for example, a financial difficulty involving debts that fluctuates in severity as new financial events occur. Severe events, matched to areas of ongoing marked difficulties, were found to be particularly pathogenic.

Studies in inner-London in the 1970s showed that severe life events (those that are highly threatening or unpleasant) were relatively common in the community with approximately one in three individuals experiencing at least one in a year. They were also found to be more common in working-class groups, in inner-city locations, and among single-parent families. Among events judged to be severe, three- quarters involved close relationships and these more often led to depression outcomes.

The extension of this methodology to children was undertaken in the 1980s simultaneously by Goodyer and by Sandberg, following the Paykel and Brown traditions, respectively. A similar role for stressor and disorder was found in children but with chronic difficulties given a more prominent role. Parallel work looked at stressors simultaneously in parents and children and showed a large degree of familial patterning.