Hispanic Stress Inventory-Adolescent Version Study

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term objective of the proposed research is to develop an innovative stress assessment tool for Hispanic adolescents. A SBIR Phase I study will determine the feasibility of a Phase II study to further validate and norm 2 commercial adolescent versions of the Hispanic Stress Inventory (H.S.I.): The immigrant and non-immigrant versions (HSI-A-I/NI). The specific aims of this study of Hispanic early and late adolescents are to: 1) identify the salient conceptual psychosocial stress domains; 2) specify discrete domain-specific stressor events and their appraisal for clinical and non-clinical samples that include immigrant, language and ethnic origin subgroups; 3) generate a pool of closed-ended stressor and appraisal items formatted in a Likert style to be included in the HSI-A draft tool; 4) evaluate the content validity of the HSI-A for each adolescent conceptual stress domain. A cross-sectional, multi-stage research design with multisite, multimethod and multimeasure features will be applied. Stage 1 will telephone interview an expert panel to identify the conceptual and relevant stress domains. Stage 2 will use focus group interview methods. A stratified sample of middle and high school students and clinical clients will be selected (N=250) to participate in focus groups (N=30) from the research sites of Trenton, NJ and San Fernando, CA. Stage 3 will conduct qualitative analysis of the telephone data to generate a logically interconnected pool of items. In Stage 4 the content validity will be evaluated using Cohen's Kappa statistic of inter-rater agreement and an item analysis. The feasibility of the Phase II study will be determined by multiple criteria that include: obtaining targeted number of participants; adequate representation from the sub-groups of ethnic populations and consensus among expert panel on HSI item content as evidenced by a Cohen's Kappa of 0.70 or higher. Ultimately, the HSI-A will be advertised and supplied to the mental health care field where it will have relevance as an early warning mental health screening tool to improve diagnostic formulation.