Abstract
Parents of a sample of 272 children and adolescents admitted consecutively to a child psychiatric outpatient department responded to a questionnaire asking for prior life events. A subsample of 54 subjects was matched with a control group randomly collected from private pediatric practice. Scores based on the total number of life events and the number of undesirable life events and respective scores based on life change units were calculated. Compared to controls the child psychiatric group had higher scores with regard to number of total past life events and past undesirable life events. There were no significant differences as far as recent events were concerned. Life change units led to nothing more than a standard weight for each item. When life events scores were compared among various child psychiatric diagnoses no significant differences emerged. In comparison with a rating of psychosocial situation, the discriminative power of life-event scores with regard to the two main groups of conduct and emotional power was rather limited. We conclude that the effect of life events as measured by questionnaire techniques on child psychiatric disorder seems to be rather unspecific.
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