PERCEIVED STRESS LEVELS OF EVENTS ASSOCIATED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF HOSPITALIZATION: Development and Testing of a Measurement Tool

Respondents were asked to rate 45 stress-producing events related to the experience of hospitalization in terms of the relative amount of adaptation required to cope with each event, using an arbitrary standard. A high consensus about the order of events was found among several sample subgroups. Younger people rated the stress value of events higher in magnitude than older people; people with recent hospitalizations rated events higher than those with hospitalizations in the more distant past. Events were generally not rated higher by people who had personally experienced them than by people who had not experienced them.