Assessing school-related stressors and coping mechanisms in adolescents

Despite a plethora of instruments used to measure stressors and coping mechanisms in adolescents little attention has been paid to issues of reliability and validity. In an endeavour to overcome this problem, a statistical methodology was implemented to develop scales from existing item sets. Items from Kohn and Frazer's (1986) Academic Stress Scale were combined with Strutynski's (1985) list of problems and, together with items from Patterson and McCubbin's (1987) Adolescent Coping Orientation for Problem Experiences, were administered to 1699 secondary school students in Australia. Two scale, the School Stressors Inventory for Adolescents (SSIA) and the Coping Inventory for Adolescents (CIA), were produced with five and four subscales respectively. Both have strong face and factorial construct validity, and high to modest reliability.