Life event reports by psychiatric patients, nonpatients, and their partners

The Schedule of Recent Experience (SRE) was completed for three separate two-month periods by groups of male psychiatric patients, male nonpatients, and their partners (primarily spouses). Each partner completed the SRE for life events believed to have occurred to the index person. For both patient and nonpatient pairs, perfect agreement was reported for only about one third of the responses where at least one pair member reported an occurrence. With disagreements, index persons were little more likely than their partners to report that an event occurred. Agreement was higher for clearly worded than for vaguely worded items in both patient and nonpatient groups. Among nonpatient pairs only, agreement was higher for events that would be difficult to hide from a partner than for those that could be kept hidden. Agreement for undesirable events for either group.