Resource Center

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Interdisciplinary Health Team Care Conference, which took place September 9-11, 1993 in Las Vegas, Nevada.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

Because life events may affect team functioning, it is important to assess the recent history of teams' life events when doing research or consultation relevant to the quality of team functioning.  In this paper, we provide a preliminary report on the content and psychometric properties of a new scale measuring the number and stressfulness of life events in interdisciplinary health care teams. In addition, we examine the frequency of occurence of each event and the levels of stress experienced when the events occurs. Finally, we examine differences among team types in the frequency and stressfulness of events experienced.

Initial examination of the psychometric properties of the scale provide some indication that it is a valid and reliable indicator of stressful events in teams. If stressful events in the recent history of team influence the quality of team functioning, then this scale should prove useful in doing field research and consultation with health care teams.