The social readjustment rating scale: A comparative study of Swedes and Americans

Abstract

IT HAS become apparent that among twentieth century peoples there is rather universal agreement concerning the relative significances of many commonly experienced life change events [l-4]. Such events range from an individual’s change of residence, or a vacation, to life changes of greater significance such as retirement from work, or death of a spouse. Prior reports concerning subjects’ scaling of a standard series of life changes, between various cultures and various American sub-cultures, have emphasized the high levels of agreement found between two samples’ rank orderings of the life change eventsrl-41. It has also been found, however, that up to 45 per cent of the life change events are given significantly different mean scores by two different samples [2]. This report presents recently derived life changes scaling data for both young and middle-aged Swedish samples and these data are compared to results previously obtained for comparable American samples. As found in previous cross-cultural life changes scaling studies, an impressively high agreement was seen between Swedes and Americans in their rank ordering of the standard list of 43 life change events. This time, however, up to 84 per cent of the life change questions were given significantly different mean scores by the Swedish and American samples. In an effort to illustrate this often substantial variance between samples, a technique of graphing of the data around ideal and actual regression lines, for pairs of samples, is presented.