Describes a methodology for assessing the difficulty Soviet Jewish adolescents have adjusting to life in the United States. Participants in the study were 146 refugees attending a suburban Baltimore, Maryland, high school who responded to the Daily Hassles Microsystem Scale, the Hopkins Symptom Checklist, a shortened version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale, the Adolescent Family Life Satisfaction Index, the Psychological Sense of School Membership scale, and the Acculturation to American and Russian Cultures scale. Results indicated that the most frequent problems, or hassles, involved experiencing discrimination at school and that these hassles were rated the most severe. Language difficulties were among the least severe hassles. The validity of the inventories was evaluated by correlating the frequency and intensity of the hassles with such measures as loneliness and family satisfaction. Among the findings were that Russian acculturation correlated positively with discrimination hassles, and American acculturation correlated negatively with language hassles. Further research is necessary (1) to determine whether the experiences of hassles can be broadly applied to other immigrant and refugee groups in other communities and (2) to separate out personality characteristics, which interfere with an understanding of the correlation between the occurrence of an event and distress. (69 references)
