Inventory of daily stressors

Abstract

Daily stress is an essential part of a modern adult life, and this tendency leads to a continued growth of research on content, mechanisms, factors and predictors of daily stress. Despite it, there is still no instrument that could provide enough clear consideration of the daily stressors. Main aim of this work was to develop a questionnaire that would incorporate a reasonably wide repertoire of daily stressors, on one hand, and could be applied to any period within adulthood, on another. The process of development and primary validation of the questionnaire, designed to estimate daily stressors, is presented. The study sample was 335 adults aged 20–68, from Saint-Petersburg and Arkhangelsk, in particular 119 males and 216 females. Primary validation included: expert evaluation of the stressors and analysis of their content, alpha-factorization of stressors and identification of scales, interpretation of those scales, estimation of their consistency and convergent validity. Analysis showed that 55 items out of the preliminary formulated daily stressors were perspective for use. Factorization revealed 10 factors of daily stress: "Work–business", "Relations with others", "Plans interruption", "Finance", "Planning", "Family problems", "Environment", "Feelings–loneliness", "State of health", "Competition". The α-Cronbach obtained for the questionnaire was 0,949, results showed high consistence of the factors of daily stressors. Psychometric characteristics of the developed instrument suggest that it can be used as a questionnaire for the study of daily stressors of an adult.