Developing and validating a stress appraisal measure forminority adolescents

Journal of Adolescence 28 (2005) 547–557 Impact Factor: 1.802

A.A. Rowley et al. Department of Psychology, San Diego State University, USA

Presenter :M. Saffari

Introduction

• cognitive appraisal of stress• cognitive appraisals: primary and secondary• In adult populations there have been a

number of varied approaches used to measure appraisal For example, many researchers have measured appraisal with single-items or mini-scales.

• Others have used adjective checklists based on the original appraisal measure developed by Folkman and Lazarus.

• others have applied situation-specific measure of appraisal.

• In sum, these instruments suffer from either questionable reliability and/or have not explored the potential multidimensional structure of the appraisal construct.

• there is one instrument that was designed to measure appraisal in a multidimensional fashion: the Stress Appraisal Measure.

• The original SAM consisted of three primary (Threat, Challenge, and Centrality) and three secondary (Controllable-by-self, Controllable-by-others, and Uncontrollable-by-anyone) appraisal scales.

• There have not been attempts to establish the validity of the SAM (or a similar appraisal measure) for use in adolescent populations.

• researchers will examine whether or not (some) adolescents are predisposed to appraise stress in particular manner (e.g. As a challenge or as a threat) and to develop a suitable instrument for this purpose.

Method

• Study participants• One hundred and seventy-two adolescents

between the ages of 14 and 18.• The gender composition was divided evenly.• Over half of the sample (54.7%) was

Latino/Mexican American, with smaller percentages of other ethnicities.

• Measures and procedure• Stress appraisal was assessed using items

from the original SAM (Peacock & Wong, 1990).This included 24 items that purport to measure three dimensions of primary appraisal (Centrality [e.g. There are long-term consequences as the result of stress], Threat [e.g. Stress has a negative impact on me],

• and Challenge [e.g. I am eager to tackle problems]) and three dimensions of secondary appraisal (Self [e.g. I have the ability to overcome stress], Others [e.g. There is help available to me], Uncontrollable [e.g. I feel totally helpless]).

• Participants were asked to respond to the items with respect to how they generally think and feel when encountering a stressful event, using a rating scale that ranged from not at all (0) to a great amount (4).

• Participants also completed additional measures to assess the convergent and discriminant validity of the SAM.

• Children’s Depression Inventory• Coping Orientations and Problems Experienced

scale• Children’s Dispositional Hope Scale• Only after both parental and adolescent consent

was obtained were the adolescents allowed to participate in the study.

• On average, the questionnaire took 20 min to complete.

• Factor analytic procedures• Because of the instability that has been found

in the factor structure of the SAM in previous studies, exploratory factor analyses were conducted to examine the dimensionality of the SAM for the multiethnic adolescent sample.

• Once a plausible factor structure was determined, the factorial validity of the target model was again tested using CFA.

• In order to determine model fit for the CFAs:• Chi 2 test statistic• Comparative Fit Index (CFI)• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation

(RMSEA)

Results• Because the primary goal of this study was to

develop a relatively pure measure of appraisal for adolescents, items were retained if primary loadings exceeded .50 and all secondary loadings were less than .30.

• Ten items did not meet these criteria and were dropped from further analyses. A final factor analysis of the remaining 14 items resulted in a three-factor solution that accounted for 58.0% of the variance:

• factor 1 (Threat) accounted for 29.9% of the variance, factor 2 (Challenge) accounted for 18.2% of the variance, and factor 3(Resources) accounted for 9.9% of the variance.

• The revised 14-item be referred to as the Stress Appraisal Measure for Adolescents (SAMA).

Standardized factor loadings for the three-factor model

• A CFA suggested that the three-factor model for the SAMA fit exceedingly well according to the descriptive fit indices.

• loadings were significant and practically large (standardized loadings ranged from .50 to .87).

• The interfactor correlations were also significant and paralleled the relationships found in the exploratory factor analysis.

• A multigroup analysis was performed and showed that There were no significant differences between the gender groups for the factor loadings, factor variances, or the factor covariances.

• Correlations with relevant measures:• In order to establish a degree of convergent

and discriminant validity for the factors (dimensions) of the new measure, each appraisal factor was correlated with relevant measures.

Interfactor correlations between appraisal dimensions and validity measures

Discussion

• The current study found that the cognitive appraisal of stress in adolescents is less complex (i.e. involves fewer factors) than that of adults.

• the three dimensions of adolescent appraisal were found to be both robust and suitable for investigating the dispositional (and potentially situational) appraisal of stress in adolescence.

• Limitations• First, the participants used in this study were a

minority sample of low socio-economic status (SES).

• Second, it was not possible to validate the different dimensional representations of the SAM in individual ethnic groups due to sample size constraints.

• and third, the measure developed to represent appraisal was dispositional in nature.

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