List and explain several problems with the SLE (stressful life events) model

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Although the SRRS and its variants continue to be popular, there are several problems with the SLE (stressful life events) model as proposed by Holmes and Rahe that can confound some of the results. One is that many of the SLE studies supporting the model are based on retrospective self-reports. As discussed earlier, people often have difficulty remembering events accurately and may have memory distortions or biases when answering. Response bias is more likely to occur when distressed individuals are retrospectively searching for possible causes of their illnesses and interpreting ambiguous items as supportive of their illness beliefs.

Second, some of the items on SLE checklists overlap with physical illnesses because the items themselves refer to similar health related events. Thus, this overlap embeds confounds of stress and illness in the self-report instrument itself that have to be teased out if there is any hope for an accurate measurement of the stress-illness relationship. Last, the effects of negative affectivity or neuroticism levels of respondents may influence their responses since those who score high on measures of neuroticism on instruments like the NEO-PI tend to report more health complaints than their low scoring counterparts. These individuals may also endorse more SLEs that overlap with psychological disorders involving depression or anxiety (e.g., items such as Major change in eating habits or Sexual difficulties).