Outline and Evaluate research into life changes and/ or daily hassles as sources of stress
Holmes and Rahe carried out research into the idea that life changes are linked to stress and illness. They suggested that change is stressful and therefore this affects health. They developed the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS), as a way to measure the relationship between life changes and physical illness. The SRRS is made up of 43 life events and each event is given a score called life change units (LCUs).

Rare et al used the SRRS to test the hypothesis that the number of life events a person experienced would be positively correlated with illness. He used 2700 participants which were all males who worked for the US Navy and made them complete the SRRS. They made them carry out a questionnaire before a tour of duty and they had to note down all the life events that they experienced in them six months (to create the LCU score). An illness score was then calculated based on the number, type and severity of illnesses that the men developed whilst on tour. The SRRS and the illness score were analysed and it was discovered that there was a significant weak positive correlation between LCU score and illness score of + 0.118.
They found that it does not matter whether an event is positive or negative; it is the amount of change an individual has to deal with during a life event that creates stress. This supports the idea that there is a positive correlation between life changes and physical illness, this occurs because life changes cause stress and stress causes illness.

A strength of this research is that it used a large sample size, as 2700 individuals completed the SRRS, so the results are more likely to representative and valid due to the larger sample size.
However, this study can be criticised as androcentric because it only used male participants and therefore