The Hassles Assessment Scale for Students in College: Measuring the Frequency and Unpleasantness of and Dwelling on Stressful Events

Abstract

Development of the Hassles Assessment Scale for Students in College, a new scale to measure students' stress, is described. In the scale, students rate each of 54 hassles for its frequency and unpleasantness in the past month and indicate the degree to which they dwelt or ruminated on it. Very high levels of internal consistency for the frequency, unpleasantness, and dwelling measures were found. Correlational analyses demonstrated the scale's criterion validity (scores were negatively correlated with the number of hours respondents reported engaging in physical exercise) and congruent validity (scores were positively correlated with scores on the Inventory of College Students' Recent Life Experience, an established scale for assessing student hassles). Exploratory factor analyses suggested the possibility that many items on the scale are independent, with each contributing some specific variance to the total variance of the item pool that is not shared with other items.

Stress among higher education students: towards a research agenda

“…Examples of such inventories include; the Life Experience Survey (Saroson et al 1978), the Hassles Scale (Kanner et al 1981), the Social Support Inventory (Pennebaker 1982), the Hassles Assessment Scale for Students in College (Sarafino et al 1999), Student Life Stress Inventory (Gadzella 1991), the College Chronic Life Stress Survey (Towbes et al 1996), the Student Stress Scale (Insel et al 1985), the Perceived Stress Scale (Cohen et al 1989) and the Academic Stress Scale (Abouserie 1994).…”

Evaluating the nature of hassles and uplifts in the retail shopping context

“…To date, hassles and uplifts have been examined mainly in the area of work satisfaction (Hart et al, 1994(Hart et al, , 1995Lazarus, 1995) and the quality of college student life (Blankstein et al, 1991;Sarafino and Ewing, 1999). Specifically, Van Katwyk et al (2000) research revealed that work stressors were significant predictors of job satisfaction and affective well-being.…”

“…Sarafino and Ewing (1999) subsequently broadened the definition of hassles. Their research found that common annoyances or irritants ranging from minor annoyances to fairly major pressures, problems, or difficulties could also be considered hassles.…”

“…Hassles can occur few or many times (Blankstein et al, 1991) and are task-or event-specific (Hart et al, 1994). Hassling experiences are considered irritating, frustrating, and distressing happenings that to some degree characterize everyday transactions (Blankstein et al, 1991) and they were found to be just as emotionally trying and stressful as major life events (Sarafino and Ewing, 1999). …”

Comparative Analysis of Factors Responsible for Job Stress in a Selected Public and Private University in Nigeria

“…Job stress has been implicated in the onset and maintenance of so many acute and chronic diseases, scientific priorities have shifted to focus on primary and secondary prevention strategies by way of stress reduction and stress management techniques in order to reduce the burden of disease on the population (Ebrahim & Davey Smith, 1998;Schneiderman, Antoni, Saab, & Ironson, 2001;Kromhout, Menotti).Though stress is a universal construct that affects all humans, studies shows that different populations are known to have different stressors (Sarafino & Ewing, 1999;Morrison & O'Connor, 2005) Several studies have highlighted the deleterious consequences of high workloads or work overload. According to Beehr, (1995) work overloads and time constraints were significant contributors to work stress among community nurses.…”