Participants were asked about the occurrence of 15 categories of SLE during the 12 months prior to the interview. These included assault, robbery, legal problems, major financial problems, serious housing problems, job loss, serious difficulties at work, serious illness or injury, serious marital problems, divorce/separation, loss of confidant, interpersonal conflict, serious personal crisis experienced by someone in the network, serious illness of someone in the network, and death of an individual in the network. Network questions were repeated for multiple individuals (cotwin, parent, children, spouse/partner, siblings, other relatives, and close friends). Owing to modifications in interview length and structure between FF4 (a telephone interview) and MF2 (a longer, in-person interview), the actual number of SLE questions asked in the 2 samples was different: 42 for FF4 and 70 for MF2. Responses to MF2 questions reflecting the same event were collapsed to be comparable with the corresponding item in FF4 (e.g., “separated in last 12 months” and “decide to separate for 2 weeks or more from your wife/husband/partner” in MF2 were treated as equivalent to “marital separation” in FF4).
