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Objectives. Assessing the incidence, nature, severity, and psychological effects of stalking and relational harassment for victims is a difficult task and conceptual issues have hampered previous research, making it difficult for psychologists and clinicians to predict psychological sequelae for victims and develop appropriate treatments.
Design. A new scale was developed that included a measure of participants' levels of subjective distress/disturbance to aid clinicians to better assess the incidence, nature, and level of stalking and/or relational harassment for victims.
Methods. From a pool of 204 participants from Newcastle University and two business offices, it was possible to differentiate 159 persons who experienced harassment and/or stalking from the remainder who were not distressed or disturbed by such attention.
Results. Stalked and/or harassed individuals were separated into five separate groups based on their levels of stalking and five score ranges with qualitative labels, devised to aid in the interpretation of victims' levels of stalking scores. Those with higher levels of stalking reported increased levels of helplessness, symptoms of anxiety, PTSD, and depression.
Conclusion. The results indicate the importance of accommodating a subjective component in the measurement and assessment of stalking and harassment. Future directions for the development and use of the new scale are discussed.
While the beginnings of relationships are often rated as the happiest times in life, and the dissolution of relationships the saddest, recent research suggests that both these sorts of experiences are at times accompanied by unwelcome, sometimes distressing, intrusions in the form of stalking and harassment. Indeed, boundaries are blurred between acceptable affiliative behaviours and harassment and stalking. Such behaviours often occur within many social interactions that, however annoying and unwelcome, form part of many people's everyday experience (Mullen, Pathé, & Purcell, 2000a). Further ambiguity and confusion may result from beliefs that often, some perseverance in relational pursuit is to be expected and sometimes desired by the object of pursuit (Cupach & Spitzberg, 1998). Thus, attempting to differentiate certain behaviours as acceptable and other behaviours as either harassment or stalking seems problematic. Because perceptions of harassing behaviours vary depending on who the victim is, and the situation in which they occur, Sinclair and Frieze (2000) do not believe that it is possible to make a clear distinction as to what forms...