Some Effects of Social Class and Ethnic Group Membership on Judgments of the Magnitude of Stressful Life Events: A Research Note

Considerable research has been done on ratings of the magnitude of stressful life events that have been found to be related to different types of physical and psychological disorder. On the basis of studies comparing judgments from European, Japanese, and American samples of convenience, nearly universal agreement about the relative size of life event ratings has been claimed. In the present research, an expanded list of 102 life events was rated by a systematic New York City sample stratified by social class, ethnicity, and sex. Mean ratings supplied by the 92 New York City judges correlated highly with those previously published from the West Coast American, Japanese, and Western European samples. These correlations, however, decreased monotonically with New York social class. Further analyses show that these results can be explained both by true differences in ratings and by errors in the rating task that are related to the class and ethnic backgrounds of the New York City judges. The findings indicate that cultural differences in judgments about the magnitude of life events are greater than previous reports based largely on samples of convenience have suggested.