Development of the Social Readjustment Rating Scale [by Holmes and Rahe 1967].

... Development of the Social Readjustment Rating Scale [by Holmes and Rahe 1967] AIM: - The 2 medical doctors developed the SRRS in order to test their hypothesis that, "stress as created by life events was a cause of physical illness". PROCEDURES: - *They observed that patients tended to have experienced several life events in the months before the onset of illness. *To test their hypothesis they developed the SRRS, by examining 5000 patient records and making a list of 43 life events that seemed to precede illness. *Then they asked about 400 participants to rate each item in terms of stress it produced. *They assigned a random value of 500 to marriage as a reference point. Specifically they asked participants to think of each event and to answer the question "is this event indicative of more or less readjustment than marriage?". *At the end, they averaged everyone's results and divided by 10 to get a measure of the

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