The Perceived Stress Scale: an unrestricted approach to its psychometric properties in non-clinical population and treated substance-addicts

The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) is currently one of the most used self-reports to estimate the extent to which people feel that they control the challenges of life or are overwhelmed by them. An unrestricted exploratory factor analysis over a sample of participants from the general population (n= 1023) and a confirmatory analysis in a clinical sample of drug addicts in treatment (n= 542) were performed. From the three versions (14, 10 and 4 items), the results suggest that the 10-item version is the one has better psychometric fit indicators in both samples. Addicted people showed higher levels of perceived stress in all age groups, which was associated with passive coping strategies (avoidance) and higher levels of prefrontal behavioral symptoms in everyday life. In conclusion, the 10-item version of the PSS presents enough psychometric properties for its use in estimating the perceived stress, applied both to general population and clinical samples. Its use allows to estimate a crucial variable in the study of stress-related conditions such as prefrontal dysfunction and strategies that the people used to cope with the difficulties of life.