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As noted in the preceding chapter, epidemiological research on the significance of social stress for health and well-being can be traced to the 1930s. However, the onset of the continuing preoccupation among epidemiologists with the role and significance of life stress followed Holmes and Rahe's (1967) publication of the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS). This instrument elaborated the Schedule of Recent Experiences (Hawkins, Davies, & Holmes, 1957) by employing a panel of judges to rate the amount of adjustment they thought each event would typically require. In retrospect, the most crucial effect of this innovation may have been its contribution to the face validity of the checklist approach. The availability of normatively generated differential weights overcame the counterintuitive necessity of treating events that seemed of very different severity as though they were equally relevant to health and well-being. Whatever the nature of the advance embodied in the SRRS, its publication was followed by a huge outpouring of research, and it became the best known and the most widely used approach to measuring life events. The conceptualization that initially informed the checklist approach in general, and the procedure for weighting each experienced event in particular, posited that one's level of experienced stress was embodied in the cumulative amount of change or readjustment brought about by events occurring in one's life (Holmes & Rahe, 1967). The idea that the amount of change is the event property that is responsible for the stressful impact of life events was based largely on Selye's (1956) contention that stress is comprised of …