Romanian Version of the Perceived Stress Scale: An Investigation of its Psychometric Properties

AbstractThe Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) is a widely used stress instrument that measures the degree to which life events are perceived as stressful. The goal of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Romanian version of the PSS-10 with a non-clinical sample. The subjects of the study were 528 undergraduate students at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy “Carol Davila”, Bucharest, Romania. All of the diagnostic tests indicated the adequacy of proceeding with factor analysis. Specifically, Bartlett's test of sphericity was statistically significant (P<0.0001), and the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) value was 0.89.The overall Cronbach's alpha was 0.855, and the test–retest reliability coefficient was 0.72. The Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) showed that the rotated factor solution for the PSS-10 contained two factors with with eigenvalues greater than 1, which accounted for 56.798% of the variance. Factor 1 consisted of 6 items representing “negative feelings” (Items 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, and 10) and accounting for 44.04% of the variance; whereas Factor 2 consisted of 4 items representing “positive feelings” (Items 4, 5, 7, and 8) and accounting for 12.76% of the variance. The item loadings ranged from 0.629 to 0.797. The Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) indicated a very good fit of this two-factor model to this sample.The Romanian version of the PSS-10 demonstrated adequate psychometric properties for evaluating stress level