NCJ Number
210609
Journal
Journal of Youth and Adolescence Volume: 34 Issue: 3 Dated: June 2005 Pages: 207-219
Date Published
June 2005
Length
13 pages
Annotation
This study developed, standardized, and established initial reliability and validity for the Adolescent Minor Stress Inventory (AMSI), a new measure of minor stress for adolescents.
Abstract
The AMSI purports to improve upon existing adolescent stress measures by not emphasizing school or classroom-based stressors; it also includes a method of adjusting for the overreporting and underreporting of stress. In order to collect initial normative and validity data, a pool of potential study participants 13 to 17 years old was drawn from the Mayo Clinic local registration database in Rochester (Minnesota). The AMSI was mailed to 1,865 adolescents, which yielded 720 (39 percent) usable surveys. Standardized scoring was developed, and the findings provide initial data that supports the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the AMSI. The AMSI exhibited high internal consistency and a significant positive relationship with a widely used measure of state anxiety. The inclusion of a method of adjusting for respondents' efforts to overreport or underreport the impact of stressors is a distinctive strength of the AMSI, since findings suggest that adolescents have a relatively high rate of endorsement of the "faking good and bad" subscale items. This report recommends follow-up studies to assess the convergent and divergent validity of the measure, as well as the use of multiple approaches to confirm the factor structure. 5 tables and 56 references