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 is “were you physically punished in a way that resulted in bruises, burns, cuts or broken bones?” (Kubany et al. 2000). This strategy could be applied to questions about racial discrimination in which behaviorally descriptive language that avoided global and emotionally charged words could clearly specify the experiences that should be included. This approach can improve assessment but has the downside of potentially missing other important stressors that do not fall within the specified criteria (Dohrenwend 2006).
