The Stressful Life Events Screening Questionnaire (SLESQ) was found to have good coverage and that all but one of the events on the SLESQ were spontaneously nominated as being at least stressful, most were seen as very stressful or traumatic. The exception was the item addressing attempted rape, which fared poorly in all three studies. The SLESQ was developed to screen for a history of 13 Criterion A stressor events that would be expected to be associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Today, there is vast number of instruments designed to measure trauma histories in specific areas of exposure. This article describes the use of three different qualitative methods to evaluate the SLESQ for its overall quality and cultural validity in a sample of low-income African-American women. The interest was in assessing the comprehensiveness and coverage of the measure and how easy it was to understand. Specifically, the goals of the study were (1) to understand how poor African-American women thought about and talked about traumatic experiences; (2) to evaluate the appropriateness of the SLESQ for this population; and (3) to evaluate wording, administration, and understanding of specific questions on the SLESQ. Tables, appendix, references