Summary
This report consists of a re-analysis of life event and illness onset data collected in community and hospital based studies of women in Camberwell, London. Previous analyses of this data by Brown and colleagues adopted a categorical approach, with a high threshold for deciding whether severe life stress had occurred. However, further practical and theoretical advances in investigating event-illness relationships may be achieved by considering an alternative conceptualisation of life stress. This report contrasts the results obtained by the categorical approach with those from one based upon a model of adversity incorporating assumptions both of additivity between events and of decay in their stressful effect over time. The results suggest that whilst the two methods are complementary in substantive terms, they convey markedly different practical and theoretical possibilities.
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Surtees, P.G., Rennie, D. Adversity and the onset of psychiatric disorder in women. Soc Psychiatry 18, 37–44 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00583386
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00583386