The Life Events Scale for Children (LES-C; (Coddington 1972)) is composed of 25 items that each represent a stressful life event (e.g., “Your parents got divorced” and “You were hospitalized for a serious illness”). Participants are asked to indicate which events they have experienced in the prior 6 months; items were summed for a measure of total stress exposure. Life events checklists are the most commonly used instruments to assess adolescent stress (Grant et al. 2004), and the LES is one of the two most commonly used checklists in the adolescent stress literature (Hammen 2008).
