Abstract
Children and adolescents are confronted with a variety of stressful experiences that may impact their developmental and learning processes. Yet, little is known about the way stressors actually are measured in research. To bridge this gap, this study conducted a scoping review of measures indexing child and adolescent stressors (N = 56). The results shed light on key fundamental dimensions that undergird the definition of stressors (space and time, quantification of stressfulness) and on the qualities of existing measures (content validity, composite reliability, convergent validity, and criterion validity), but also on their limitations for conducting quantitative research on youth stress processes (e.g., overreliance on long checklists or interviews, lack of demonstrated measurement invariance). Implications are drawn for the development of more integrative and efficient measures of stressors.
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Notes
For certain scales, the scoring method has not been reported (Agurto & Muñoz, 2015; Alban Metcalfe et al., 1982; Burnett & Fanshawe, 1997; Chandler, 1981; Dobson, 1980; Harper & Marshall, 1991; Kohn & Frazer, 1986; Kohn & Milrose, 1993; Monck & Dobbs, 1985; Omizo et al., 1988; Siddique & D’Arcy, 1984). Based on the fact that single scores were used in these studies, one may assume that the authors computed sum scores.
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The authors would like to thank Roger J. R. Levesque for his great help and pedagogical advice while conducting the editorial work for this publication.
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This research was supported partly by a doctoral grant to the first author (Appel à projets Grenoble Innovation Recherche “DESCOL”).
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FNR participated in designing the review (i.e., conceptualization, methodology, investigation), in collecting the data, and in writing the original draft of the manuscript; IA participated in designing, verifying and validating the review, and in reviewing and editing the draft; PB participated in designing the review, and in reviewing and editing the draft; CN participated in reviewing and editing the draft. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Núñez-Regueiro, F., Archambault, I., Bressoux, P. et al. Measuring Stressors Among Children and Adolescents: A Scoping Review 1956–2020. Adolescent Res Rev 7, 141–160 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40894-021-00168-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40894-021-00168-z