Life-Events and Difficulties Schedule

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The Life Events and Difficulties Schedule is a psychological measurement of the stressfulness of life events. It was created by Brown and Harris in 1978.^[1] Instead of accumulating the stressfulness of different events, as was done in the Social Readjustment Rating Scale by Holmes and Rahe^[2], they looked at individual events in detail. The schedule is made up of an interview by which as much contextual information around the event as possible is collected. The event is then rated by "blind" raters using this contextual information.

Critics of this method note the fact that the impact of the independent variable, the event itself, is measured by evaluating it using mediating and moderating variables.

References

^ Brown, G.W. and Harris, T.O. (1978). Social origins of depression: A study of psychiatric disorder in women. London: Tavistock. ISBN 0422763101.
^ Holmes, T.H. and Rahe, R.H. (1967). "The social readjustments rating scales". Journal of Psychosomatic Research 11 (2): 213–218. doi:10.1016/0022-3999(67)90010-4. PMID 6059863.