The stress literature offers three options for assessing severity. First, the narrative-rating methodology is a labor intensive interview that gathers details about each potentially stressful experience so that trained researchers can then rate them on multiple dimensions of stressfulness (Dohrenwend 2006). This approach has been shown to be superior to standard checklists of stressful events but because interviewing and rating can take as much as 16 hours per individual interview (Dohrenwend 2006), it is too time consuming and expensive to be a practical option for most researchers. A second approach is to clearly define what kinds of experiences should be included in a category and/or spell out the inclusion or exclusion criteria for the target stressful experience (Dohrenwend 2006). For example, in the Traumatic Life Events Questionnaire (Kubany et al. 2000), instead of asking the respondent if s/he had been in a motor vehicle accident, the respondent is asked “were you involved in a motor vehicle accident for which you received medical attention or that badly injured or killed someone.” Similarly, the question assessing the presence of childhood physical abuse
