Measuring War-Related Stress: Development and Validation of the Perceived War Stress Scale

Abstract

  The present study was aimed to develop and validate Perceived War Stress Scale (PWSS) a self-report Urdu questionnaire to measure subjective stress due to war and the potential of war and to explore its relationship with problem-focused and emotion-focused coping. The study adopted quantitative cross-sectional scale development design. A sample of 326 university students who spoke Urdu and were over 18 years old was taken. Participants completed a demographic information sheet, the 23 item PWSS, and a coping styles measure. The content validation was done by expert review, and psychometric properties were explored by descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, and principal axis factoring and correlation analysis.  The PWSS had an excellent internal consistency, Cronbach’s alpha .92. KMO value was .929 and Bartlett's test of sphericity was significant χ ² (253) = 3836.853, p < .001, which indicated the appropriateness for factor analysis. The one factor solution was supported by the principal axis factoring with 41.245% of the total variance. The factor extracted for most items was adequate to represent them, except for PWS13, which had low communality and needs to be reviewed. The positive correlation between PWSS and emotion-focused coping (r = .634, p < .01) was found to provide support for convergent validity. Problem-focused coping was weakly related with PWSS, r = .08, which was not significant. The PWSS seems to be a valid and potential Urdu stress scale for War. Results indicate that emotional coping responses are more likely to be related to perceived war stress than problem-focused coping responses. Further confirmation of this with confirmatory factor analysis and other samples is recommended.