Measuring life event stress in the lives of college students: The Undergraduate Stress Questionnaire (USQ)

Abstract

We describe the development of the Undergraduate Stress Questionnaire (USQ), a life events checklist designed to measure stress among undergraduates. Several studies demonstrate the USQ's validity. The USQ correlates positively with physical symptoms and negatively with mood. Students rated the USQ as the most complete and accurate of four different life events questionnaires. In a panel study, the USQ closely tracked subjective reports of stress, both during the term and finals week. The USQ predicted symptoms more reliably than three other stress measures, controlling for negative affect. Students waiting in the college infirmary score higher on the USQ than students socializing on campus. Finally, we compare the checklist format to subjective scaling, and show the superiority of the checklist version. We discuss the usefulness of the USQ in terms of validity, representativeness, adaptability, brevity, and low confounding with negative affect.

Higher chronic psychological stress is associated with blunted affective responses to strenuous resistance exercise: RPE, pleasure, pain

“…The USQ correlates well with other stress inventories; e.g. r ¼ .79 with Subjective Distress Scale, and r ¼ .97 with the Objective Stressor Scale (Crandall et al, 1992).…”

“…The internal consistency for this earlier sample (Cronbach's a) was .76. This was supplemented by an unweighted version of the Undergraduate Stress Inventory (USQ), which was used to measure school and nonschool related life event stress that occurred in the month prior to evaluation (Crandall, Preisler, & Aussprung, 1992). The objective form is a checklist that has 83 items representing common stressors for undergraduates.…”

Looming Maladaptive Style as a Moderator of Risk Factors for Anxiety

“…A large pool of items was selected from previously used measures of daily stress and negative life events in college students (e.g., Crandall et al 1992). Using data from 10 graduate and undergraduate student raters, the 10 events selected for the final questionnaire were rated as being: (1) objectively defined (to minimize the possible influence of cognitive biases in measures of the experiences of threatening events); (2) moderately to severely threatening (i.e., an average score of three or higher on a 5-point scale); and (3) likely to have a base rate greater than 10% in a one month period in a college sample.…”

Life Events

“…This method is based on the well-established Life Events and Difficulties Schedule (Brown and Harris 1989). Other questionnaires use pre-identified weightings of the severity of events to determine an overall life event burden score, such as the Undergraduate Stress Questionnaire (Crandall et al 1992) in which more severe events such as bereavement are given higher weightings.…”