The Broad Inventory of Specific Life Events (BISLE): Development, Validation, and Population Prevalence

This study presents the Broad Inventory of Specific Life Events (BISLE), a comprehensive inventory and coding schedule that categorizes a far wider range of life events occurring in the past year than those covered in previous inventories. The BISLE uses a checklist of select probe events combined with a coding scheme for qualified responses to an open-ended question capturing the broad range of other events people perceive as being important to them in the past year. We demonstrate the utility of the BISLE using a large-scale national probability New Zealand sample (N = 47,951). Life events relating to health (29.65%), death (21.25%), work (13.78%), and relationships (9.61%) were the most frequently reported as having occurred in the past year. Further, women, younger people, and ethnic minority group members reported more overall annual events. Coding of open-ended responses from the BISLE demonstrated excellent inter-rater reliability. Validation analyses indicated that the BISLE predicted key outcomes in expected directions, including life satisfaction and psychological distress. The BISLE was developed for large-scale panel studies with limited space that could benefit from capturing self-reports of diverse life events occurring in people's lives over a given timeframe.