Enhancing our understanding of discrimination and health will also require greater attention to identifying strategies to address the limitations of the currently used measures. Problems that have been identified with the reliability and validity of traditional life event scales also apply to most measures of discrimination (Monroe 2008). These problems include unreliability of recall, recall bias, criterion validity and construct validity have (Dohrenwend 2006). It is important to capture exposure to discrimination over the life course and the most common time frame for the assessment of discrimination is lifetime exposure (Kressin et al. 2008). This is appropriate given the goal of capturing cumulative exposure over the life course. However, problems linked to recall are more severe when the recall period of stressors is longer and when the data are gathered from retrospective reports. Of particular concern are some studies of PTSD that suggest that recall bias can lead to an overestimation of a dose–responsive relationship between exposure and outcome (Dohrenwend 2006). Current mood affects memory retrieval and both depressed and PTSD patients have impaired retrieval in terms of memory (Harvey
