Friday, 14 January 2005 - 2:00 PM

This presentation is part of: Measuring Distress, Well-Being and Burden

Development and Validation of the Psychological Distress Scale

Professionals in fields of practice that experience high levels of stress and trauma are likely to experience negative psychological outcomes, such as psychological distress. Researchers and practitioners that investigate psychological outcomes may utilize numerous scales to measure such outcomes. Consequently, a brief easily scored instrument that can be administered alone or together with other measures can be beneficial in numerous ways. This paper describes the development of a self-report psychological distress scale that was created using symptoms from the Center for Epidemiological Studies’ Depression Scale (CES-D; Ratloff, 1977) and the Langner index (1962). Psychological distress is a state of depression and anxiety, and individuals who are depressed also tend to be anxious, and anxious individuals tend to be depressed (Mirowsky & Ross, 1989). Based on these claims, symptoms from these two scales were modified to create the psychological distress scale. Depression and anxiety were categorized as malaise and mood, and were compared to a list of symptoms to establish face validity and content validity prior to scale development. For example, depression-malaise contains items such as ‘I had periods of time when I could not get going’ and ‘I had nightmares’ and anxiety-mood contains items such as, ‘I worried too much about things’ or ‘I had trouble remembering things’. The psychological distress scale contains 15-items that assess distress within the previous 6 months, and has anchors from (0) ‘never’ to (3) ‘frequently’ thus retaining the four anchors from the original CES-D scale. The CES-D scale was not developed to assess subtypes of depression or primary depressive disorders, but to measure the presence, frequency and duration of symptoms of depression. The scale described in this paper was developed to measure the presence, frequency and duration of symptoms of psychological distress. The psychological distress scale was administered to two separate samples that had the potential to be exposed to work and life trauma. The first sample consisted of 233 police officers. The alpha reliability was .90 (M = 17.75, SD = 8.85, range 0-43). The second sample consisted of 388 police recruits. The alpha reliability was .94 (M = 10.63, SD = 9.67, range 0-43). Kurtosis and skewness were also examined. Police recruits in the second study were less experienced and less exposed to trauma than those in the first study, therefore it was anticipated that their scores would be lower. Convergent validity was established by examining the correlations between psychological distress and perceptions of stress, since a measure that correlates well with related variables has convergent validity (Campbell & Fiske, 1959). Discriminate validity was established by examining the correlations between the distress scores and variables unrelated to distress such as age, race and ethnicity, and marital status. A third study is planned to assess criterion validity using a reliable and valid measure. These results suggest that the CES-D scale and Langner index are robust measures and when modified retain their psychometric properties, and can aid social work researchers as they develop measures through modifying and testing existing ones.

See more of Measuring Distress, Well-Being and Burden
See more of Oral and Poster

See more of Celebrating a Decade of SSWR (January 13 - 16, 2005)