Rahe, Mahan and Arthur (1970) Aim and Context

Life changes are those events that necessitate a major transition in some aspect of our life such as the death of a loved one or moving home but there is, of course, considerable variation in the impact of these 'critical' life changes.

Selye's research in the 1930s suggested a causal link between the psychological state of stress and physical illness. The study by Rahe et al wanted to investigate this relationship further by examining the stress levels that individuals experience in their ordinary lives and seeing if this was actually related to how much illness they experienced.

Psychosomatic is the term used to describe the effect that our psychological state has on our physical body.

Life change units (LCUs) are the scores given to a series of 43 life events.

The value of LCUs was originally calculated by Holmes and Rahe. They analysed the case histories of more than 5000 patients, producing a list of 43 critical life events. They established the stressfulness of each event by asking 400 people (of different ages, gender, education, etc.) to score each event in terms of how much readjustment would be required by the average person. The participants were asked to provide a numerical figure for this readjustment, taking marriage as an arbitrary baseline value of 500. If an event would take longer to readjust to than marriage, then they should give the event a larger score. Scores for all participants were totalled and averaged to produce life change units (LCUs) for each life event.

An individual’s LCU score in this study was calculated by asking each participant to indicate which life events they had experienced in the prior six months.

The aims of this study were to conduct a prospective study to investigate if there is a relationship between life events/changes and incidence of illness in a normal population.