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Holmes and Rahe (1967)

Holmes and Rahe when investigating the causes and sources of stress focused on stressors and tried to identify the characteristics of a situation that makes it stressful. This is often called the stressful life event approach or the engineering model.

In 1967, Holmes and Rahe suggested that experiencing life events, which were stressful, could produce serious damage to an individual's health. One of their major findings was that stress generated by such events seemed to be cumulative. Whether a particularly stressful period produced illness later on depended on just how much stress had been accumulated. People who had experienced an unusually high number of stressful Life Events in a given period were very much more likely to experience a prolonged illness in the following year than people who had not.

Holmes and Rahe looked at medical case histories and interviewed a large number of people who were suffering or had suffered from extreme stress. From this data, they developed a social readjustment scale, which ranked Life Events according to how much stress they appeared to give people. Not every life event was the same - for example, going through a divorce or suffering bereavement was very much more stressful than changing one's eating or sleeping habits.

An interesting Observation suggested a relationship between the social readjustment scale and subsequent health. For example, Holmes and Rahe observed that people who scored between 200 and 300 points in a given year were statistically likely to develop health problems the following year; and those who had scored over 400 points were likely to suffer a major illness. The researchers suggested that this came from the physical drain on the body produced by the continual Arousal and the general adaptation to long-term or repeated stress.

Holmes, T.H. & Rahe, R.H. (1967). The social readjustment rating scale. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 11, 213-218