Viability of Lifetime Retrospective Measurement of Major and Potentially Traumatic Life Events

• In Event: 288 - Regular Session. Life Course: 4 Papers on 4 Key Principles

Abstract

Health disparities often attributed to variation in lifetime experience of stressful events which, of course, are always in the past. Measuring these experiences can mean asking respondents to recall things that may have happened decades before. The presumed weakness of a cross-sectional study using retrospectively measures is that people will forget events that occurred long ago. Whether the recall period is decades long, events must be recalled in order to be measured. However, with the growth of life-course approaches in sociology it is increasingly the case that we must rely on long-term recall. This study addresses whether a retrospective measure of major life events is subject to decay over time. The sample consists of 2000 adults, average age 58. African American, Cuban American, non-Cuban Hispanic, and non-Hispanic white participants are included. They were asked about the possible occurrence of 41 lifetime major and potentially traumatic events. The total count of events reported by everyone in the subsample aged 52 to 93 years of age was divided into three-year intervals and plotted across years elapsed since the time of occurrence. The extent that forgetting occurs would be indicated by a declining number of reports as elapsed time increases. Evidence for validity is found in that peaks in the distribution of reports over time correspond precisely with historic events that impacted the study population. Results contradict the forgetting hypothesis, and support the use of retrospective measurement of the occurrence of major life events over the life course in an older population.

Author

• Donald A. Lloyd, University of Southern California