Factor analysis of the 9-item Psychological Stress Measure in a French Canadian non-clinical student sample

Abstract

The aim of this study is to test the unidimensional 9-items factorial model, about psychological stress, with a non-clinical sample of Canadian students, evaluated by the metric principals of factorial analysis and internal consistency. A sample of 546 university students (Women = 79.6%, Men = 20.4%, Mean age = 23.2, Standard Deviation = 7.3) were used. The results of the exploratory factorial analysis (explaining about 55.3% of the total variance of the construct) and confi rmatory (GFI = 0.994, AGFI = 0.991, CMIN / DF = 3.77, RMSEA = 0.071, CFI = 0.985) satisfactorily confi rmed its unidimensionality. The results of the internal consistency study, obtained by Cronbach’s Alpha, McDonald’s Omega, Greatest Lower Bound coeffi cient, and also the EAP scores, ensure the accuracy of the tested model. New studies should explore and test other important metric qualities of this instrument (content validity and test-retest reliability, among others).