Contextualizing experience

• Victims of stressful experiences often have other properties.
• Covariance analyses can distort causal cascades.
• Patterns of causes and outcomes are preferred.

This paper extends the discussion of Luke and Banerjee published in an earlier issue of this Journal by suggesting that psychologists studying the effects of stressful experiences on a later outcome do not always acknowledge the possibility that the experience might be correlated with conditions that are necessary for the outcome. This essay argues that the victims of a stressful event are not a random sample of the population and often belong to gender, class, or ethnic groups during particular historical eras that contribute to the outcome. The properties of these groups represent causal patterns that should replace the usual practice of examining the relation between a single independent and dependent variable.