ABSTRACT
Epidemiology is not immune to the vagaries of fashion. First, recent refinements in the methods of measurement have made it possible to capture crucial aspects of personal meaning in assessing certain qualitative aspects of life events, such as loss, danger or challenge, using rating scales with good inter-rater reliability. In this study, a new LEDS dimension of contextual danger was rated and compared with the dimension of loss described in earlier reports. Psychiatric symptoms were assessed, using the Present State Examination, so that the research findings should be directly comparable with those of the earlier Camberwell study of life events and depression. In summary, the growth of interest in biological research, far from relegating research into life events to a backwater, may encourage a multifactorial approach, in which data on life events and psychosocial vulnerability are collected alongside the detailed physiological data.
