Development of a scale to measure stress of college students

Pages: 563-567
Namita Mishra (Department of Psychology, Sarala Mahavidyalaya, Rahama)
Pratap K. Rath (Department of Psychology, Utkal University, Vani Vihar, Bhubaneswar)

This paper reports a study designed to develop a scale tomeasure stress of college students. Because of concerns regarding the absence of a suitable measure to study the stress of college students in Indian context, a scale is developed in a regional language. The items of the scale were generated by involving and interviewing the students themselves. Items from different domains of life were selected and a prototype testing was made after which it was administered to a sample of 74 fresher in the college with an average age of16.27 years with a SD of 0.32 years. Score variability of the items was used to select the final items of the scale. The psychometric properties of the scale were determined. The test-retest reliability of the scale was quite high i.e. r= 0.74. The concurrent validity of the scale (when related with the perceived quality of life scale) was also high (r=0.67).