[Development and evaluation of an instrument to assess the psychosocial environment]

It is an instrument to explore the psico-social environment that carries out a thorough inventory of the elements in such environment, it groups them in general categories that, from the process of stress (taken as the point of the departure), are the following: stressing situations, psicosocial support and facing conducts. And they are expressed in four levels or spheres of action: society, family, occupation and individual. It was intended to satisfy the need to count on relatively simple material, self-managable, widely applicable, standardized and that describes in an integral way the environment. The validity of contents and concepts was estimated through the Delphos technique. Though the concurrent validity is established by its application with another similar instrument, when this late was not available, some scales that could work as standards were use. The t Student test was used to evaluate the discrimination capacity among subgroups. In this, statistical differences were noticed for the same items with a significant value of 0.01. It was observed that the older they were there was an increasing set of stressing situations in the society and occupation spheres (correlation quotient of 0.80). According to sex, there were more stressing family situations in women. According to income, it was found that the bigger number of stressing situations and fewer psicosocial supports pertained to a higher income (correlation quotient of 0.91). It is deduced that the instrument, though it has some limitations, can be widely used. The only requirement is that it should be applied to individuals over 18 years old, of any sex and socio-economical class, and they should be literate.