Cultural variances in significant life events: A focus on the English-Speaking Caribbean

Abstract

There are lists of significant life events for North American and European populations; however, there is no comparable data for the English-speaking Caribbean region. The purpose of this study was to identify significant life events for the English-speaking Caribbean from a Trinidadian sample and compare our findings to those that are reported in the North American and European samples used in this study, with a focus on the variances and the role of culture in such. The major North American study considered was the Holmes & Rahe (Holmes and Rahe, Journal of Psychosomatic Research 11:213–218, 1967), and the European study was the Berntsen & Rubin (Berntsen and Rubin, Memory & cognition 32:427–442, 2004), both representative of individualistic cultures. A set of 26 significant life events was determined from a Trinidadian adult non-clinical sample (N = 150). The list of significant life events determined had 54% of items which were not in common with the North American list of significant life events, and there was 38.5% variation in significant life events from the list by determined by the European study. The important finding in this study is that the significant life events that were unique to this study had a cultural basis depending on where the society was on the spectrum of individualism-collectivism.