| Popis: |
Major life events as predictors of change processes in personality, psychopathology or health are of great interest to psychological research. The most common form of life event assessment in studies with many participants are life event (self-report) checklists, which enable a quick and economic assessment of very specific and concrete life events (e.g., birth of own child, divorce, job loss, etc.). In the simplest and most prevalent form of life event checklist, the mere occurrence of a list of life events (compiled by researchers) is assessed dichotomously (event did occur vs. did not occur), which comes with two important drawbacks: First, life events often have to be aggregated into broad categories, e.g., by life domain or valence (as rated by the researcher) to ensure adequate power for statistical analysis. This comes with a loss of important information, as the effects of life events within the same domain can be very heterogenous. Second, these checklists often ignore the individual perception of life events, which contains valuable information for the prediction of development processes. The aim of this study is to propose and validate a new inventory for the assessment of major life evens, which (a) contains more general formulations of life events, to ensure that these items are answered positively by a sufficiently large group of people without aggregating them and (b) includes items to assess the individual perception of life events in terms of valence and controllability. |
