Powerful research designs for studying the roles of heredity and environment in the etiology of psychiatric disorders have outstripped our ability to measure the relevant variables. Major stressful life events as important environmental variables are a case in point. There are problems of conceptualization and measurement with even the best of the self-report checklist approaches and with the more labor- intensive interview and rating approaches. The proposed research will address these problems, taking a major step toward the long-term goal of obtaining reliable and valid measures of the important objective general and specific characteristics of major, stressful life events over the life course. The general characteristics and dimensions to be investigated include valence, fatefulness, predictability, centrality, magnitude, and potential to exhaust the individual physically. Examples of specific facets of particular events are atrocities in military combat, loss of younger versus older spouses in bereavement, and victimization by acquaintances versus strangers in rape.
The specific aims are: (1) To review the Literature on case studies of important types major individual events in order to locate and define their specific dimensions in the context of their general objective dimensions; (2) to investigate how types of events, specific dimensions of events, and measures of some of their general dimensions vary with developmental stage, gender, ethnic/racial background, and socioeconomic background (SES); (3) to apply the event-specific ratings developed in I and 2 and the ratings of general dimensions to narratives of major events extracted from five completed case/control studies of the onset or adverse course of schizophrenia, major depression, antisocial personality, substance use disorders including alcoholism, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); (4) to investigate the extent to which the inclusion of measures of these group-specific and event-specific dimensions require expanded questioning and probing procedures to obtain the relevant narrative information; (5) to test the extent to which the ratings of event-specific dimensions increase the explanatory power of major negative events as risk factors in the five case/control studies; (6) to develop procedures for making these labor-intensive measures more economical by screening for major events to be intensively probed and rated; (7) to develop a manual for mapping major events over the life course; and (8) to develop plans for future research.
| Dohrenwend, Bruce P; Yager, Thomas J; Wall, Melanie M et al. (2013) THE ROLES OF COMBAT EXPOSURE, PERSONAL VULNERABILITY, AND INVOLVEMENT IN HARM TO CIVILIANS OR PRISONERS IN VIETNAM WAR-RELATED POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER. Clin Psychol Sci 1:223-238 |
| Dohrenwend, B P (2010) Toward a Typology of High-Risk Major Stressful Events and Situations in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Related Psychopathology. Psychol Inj Law 3:89-99 |
| Hatch, Stephani L; Dohrenwend, Bruce P (2007) Distribution of traumatic and other stressful life events by race/ethnicity, gender, SES and age: a review of the research. Am J Community Psychol 40:313-32 |
| Dohrenwend, Bruce P (2006) Inventorying stressful life events as risk factors for psychopathology: Toward resolution of the problem of intracategory variability. Psychol Bull 132:477-95 |
| Meyer, Ilan H (2003) Prejudice as stress: conceptual and measurement problems. Am J Public Health 93:262-5 |
