ABSTRACT
Distinguished developmental psychologist Michael Rutter (1994) criticized the entire body of research in child psychopathology for failing to meet a basic criterion when studying putative life event risk or recovery factors. Studies nearly always fail to examine systematic dose-response relationships between the alleged factors and outcome, but instead just measure child characteristics before and after. This yields completely uninterpretable results in which "utterly different mechanisms (treatments) all carry some worthwhile therapeutic benefit" (p. 936) without giving any hint at all about the mechanisms that are at work in contributing to normalcy or disorder. His view is relevant to studies of the connection of toxic life events with distress, although such research more frequently examines these phenomena in ways that can yield dose-response relationships.
