Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hi, TIPsters -
I am one of the authors of the CUSS instrument being discussed (and I'm
still at West Chester University). Anybody who would like to contact me
about it directly should feel free, but I thought it might be helpful to
post a bit of information to the whole list.
We put the CUSS together as a classroom demonstration resource. The abstract
posted by Miriam Joseph refers to "technical information" in the article,
but it includes only mean scores and distribution characteristics for
several semester's worth of students at an "unnamed" university. At the time
of its publication, no formal validity studies had been done. (Again, it was
intended as a tool for classroom demonstrations.) I had good intentions of
doing a followup on the original participants to see whether the instrument
had any predictive validity, but ended up being asked to step into an
administrative post for two years at about the time I should have surveyed
the participants, and so missed the opportunity.
This instrument is an interesting case study in the law of unintended
consequences. We developed the instrument carefully, but only as a classroom
demonstration. (Hey, This isn't even my area! I mostly work on large furry
creatures...) Since its publication, I have been contacted (a lot) by people
planning to use the instrument in research projects, and have received
reports from college counseling centers using it in student activities like
orientation. Perhaps somebody who has used the CUSS since its publication
would share any validity/reliability information they've obtained.
Nina Barnes: It might be an interesting exercise to have your students try
to find reliability/validity information on the original Holmes & Rahe
instrument, too.
Michael Renner
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Michael J. Renner
Department of Psychology
West Chester University
West Chester, PA 19383
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Telephone: 610-436-2925
Fax: 610-436-2846
"The path of least resistance is always downhill."
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