We include two measures of stressors—lifetime exposure to trauma and recent major life events–based on two batteries of questions in the home interview, one pertaining to traumatic events that respondents may have experienced at any time in the past and a second pertaining to major life events during the most recent 12 months. The specific stressors are described in Table 2. Because preliminary analyses indicated a threshold effect on depressive symptoms at a level of two types of trauma (with insufficient sample size to determine the effects of three or more traumas), we coded trauma as a dichotomous variable (0–1 versus 2+). We coded major life events in a similar way: 0–1 versus 2+; fewer than 2% of respondents reported more than two such events.
