Measuring Life Stress: Factors Affecting Fall-Off in the Reporting of Life Events

Although the use of life events inventories continues, concern persists regarding their reliability. A major problem is respondent failure to recall events which have occurred in the past. Based on information gathered from a large national probability sample, this paper concludes the following: (I) fall-off in reporting event occurrence is rapid during the first twelve months (approximately five percent per month) then begins to level off; (2) the rate offall-off varies by the type of event, such that some highly salient events (death of spouse, marriage, birth of child) show essentially no fall-off, while other events (death of friend, illness in family) have immediate and severe fall-off; and (3) the rate of fall-off varies according to respondent characteristics. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for future measurement of life stress. With the growing interest in the area of life events research has come an attendant concern over the reliability of data collected with techniques based on the retrospective cataloging of the life experiences of individual subjects over varying time periods. A major concern is respondent failure to recall events which have occurred in the past. It has been widely assumed that respondents would be less likely to remember events that are more remote in time; however, there is little evidence documenting the extent to which, as a result of time, this forgetting actually takes place.