Reliability and Validity of a Stress Scale in Public Employees from Murcia (Spain)

Abstract

Stress is common in all work environments. Technostress and the difficulty of separating the family arena from the work environment are some of the new and emerging risks faced by companies, employees and society in general. Most of the available instruments for measuring stress in workers have been focused on education professionals and healthcare workers. Therefore, it is necessary to validate simple and friendly-use tools to detect stress levels in public workers. The aim of this study was to determine the internal consistency of an adapted version of the Student Stress Inventory-Stress Manifestations (SSI-SM) for public employees and to determine if high-stress levels are related to personal and work-related factors. A cross-sectional and descriptive study was conducted from October 2016 to February 2019 including 468 Spanish public workers based in Murcia. An adapted version of the SSI-SM was administered and data on personal and work-related factors were collected. Results showed that all of the factors had Cronbach’s α over 0.700, and no items need to be deleted due to correlations with the factor exceeding 0.300. Factor 1, “Self-concept”, has a Cronbach’s α of 0.868, with values of 15.62 ± 4.99; factor 2, “Sociability”, Cronbach’s α: 0.853, with mean values of 13.33 ± 4.17; factor 3, “Somatization”, Cronbach’s α: 0.704, mean value of 5.35 ± 1.90 and: factor 4, “Uncertainty”, Cronbach’s α: 0.746, with a mean value of 8.19 ± 2.51. In conclusion, the internal consistency of the adapted SSI-SM for public employees with different work positions and shifts has been validated and determined. This study provides a useful tool for the early detection of stress in public employees and may be potentially useful for preventing the harmful consequences of stress.

The Motivations for and Well-Being Implications of Social Media Use at Work among Millennials and Members of Former Generations

“…The work life is getting more technology intensive and technostress, in other words, technology related stress that employees find challenging to cope with, is also a pervasive issue in organizations [ 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ], which has been further provoked by the COVID-19 [ 18 ]. Remarkably, younger employees are associated with higher levels of information technology (IT) related strain [ 19 ] and technostress compared to their older colleagues [ 20 ].…”

Association between COVID-19-related stress and self-directed learning ability among Korean nursing students

“…The original SSI-SM was developed in English. Simonelli-Muñoz et al administered SSI-SM to Spanish nursing students as a response-based simple tool for screening stress symptoms ( Simonelli-Muñoz et al, 2018 ), and its reliability and validity were tested in a sample of Spanish public officials ( Rodríguez-González-Moro et al, 2020 ). Moreover, SSI-SM was used to study the impact of stress during the COVID-19 pandemic among Spanish nursing students ( Gallego-Gómez et al, 2020 ).…”