Social
Readjustment Rating Questionnaire data from a selected sample of 67 New Zealanders associated with the academic, research and administrative departments of the University of Otago Faculty of Medicine at the Christchurch Hospital Clinical School, were compared with data from the original Holmes and Rahe sample of 394 middle and lower class Americans. Agreement between the New Zealand and American samples was highly significant at the 0.00001 level of confidence regarding the establishment of a relative order of magnitude to life event changes. Some interesting minor differences were observed. Americans rated higher the items relating to financial security, attitudes towards work-related matters, troubles with in-laws and religious activities. New Zealanders indicated much greater concern regarding adjustment to the death of a close friend and were slightly more concerned over matters relating to schooling. FOLLOWING the development of the Schedule of Recent Experience (SRE) by Rahe et al. [I] which pertained to show the relationship between illness onset and social stress, Holmes and Rahe [2] and Masuda and Holmes [3] evaluated the clusters of life events which appeared to occur at the time of disease and illness onset. They subsequently developed the Social Readjustment Rating Questionnaire (SRRQ), in order to define quantitatively,
values for each of these life events in terms of magnitude ratings. Their sample of 394 subjects was comprised of 323 middle class and 71 lower class Americans. Test results for reliability and validity of the SRRQ with this sample were significantly high.
Investigations have since been extended to the cross-cultural field. Holmes and Masuda [4] in their summary of available cross-cultural data found high consensus among studies of Japanese, Western European, Spanish, American Negro, Mexican, Malaysian, Hawaiian and Peruvian populations on SRRQ magnitudes and rankings, with Spearman's rank order correlation coefficients ranging from 0.62 to 0.94 [5-81. This investigation compares SRRQ data of New Zealand subjects with that of the original Holmes and Rahe sample of 394 subjects.