Discriminatory experiences that are acute and observable and are analogous to life events in the stress literature are captured by many of the other commonly used measures of discrimination in recent studies. These include the Experiences of Discrimination scale (Krieger 1990), the Schedule of Racist Events (Landrine and Klonoff 1996), the Major Experiences of Discrimination scale (Williams et al. 1997; Kessler et al. 1999); the Racism and Life Experiences Scale (Harrell 1997), and the Index of Race-Related Stress (Utsey and Ponterotto 1996). Prior research has shown that failure to assess stress comprehensively leads to an underestimation of the effects of stress on health (Turner et al. 1995). The current assessment of discrimination tends to neglect the measurement of chronic stressors in major domains of life such as work. Chronic stressors refers to experiences that provide persistent negative exposure to threat or excessive demand (Baum et al. 1993). The stress literature indicates that although chronic stressors are difficult to measure, they are stronger predictors of the onset and course of the disease than acute life events (Cohen et al. 1995). It
