The social readjustment rating scale: Updated and modernised

Abstract

The Social Readjustment Rating Scale, originally devised in 1967 by Holmes and Rahe, measures the impact of life events stress. At the time, the SRRS advanced its field of research by standardising the impact of stress with a set of independently derived weights called ‘life change units’ (LCUs) for 43 life events found to predict illness onset. The scale has been criticised for being outdated, e.g. “Mortgage over $10,000” and biased, e.g. “Wife begin or stop work”. The aim of this cross-sectional survey study is to update and improve the SRRS whilst allowing backwards compatibility. We successfully updated the SRRS norms/LCUs using the ratings of 540 predominantly UK adults aged 18 to 84. Moreover, we also updated wording of 12 SRRS items and evaluated the impact of demographics, personal experience and loneliness. Using non-parametric frequentist and Bayesian statistics we found that the updated weights were higher but broadly consistent with those of the original study. Furthermore, changes to item wording did not affect raters’ evaluations relative to the original thereby ensuring cross-comparability with the original SRRS. The raters were not unduly influenced by their personal experiences of events nor loneliness. The target sample was UK rather than US-based and was proportionately representative regarding age, sex and ethnicity. Moreover, the age range was broader than the original SRRS. In addition, we modernised item wording, added one optional extra item to the end of the scale to evaluate the readjustment to living alone and identified 3 potential new items proposed by raters. Backwards-compatibility is maintained.