[Situational effects in reporting life change events? A comparison of two assessment techniques]

Abstract

Studies on the role of life events in the development of malignant diseases (particularly breast cancer) often rely on so-called limited prospective designs: Women with a suspicious breast lump are interviewed prior to surgery. After having learnt the final diagnosis, the sample is divided into a group having cancer and a control group. Research using this approach was criticised for producing artifacts: knowledge of diagnosis should cause reevaluations of past events and lead to overreporting of stressful experiences. Two limited prospective studies using different assessment methodologies are compared for possible artifacts due to knowledge of diagnosis. When considering less severe events, the application of a checklist technique leads to marked memory bias as assumed above. When leaving the respondents time to reconstruct their events at length, no artifacts are present. Reporting of the severest event categories remains unaffected under both methods.