The Long-Lasting Stress Scale (LLSS): Psychometric evaluation of a brief stress scale in the SLOSH cohort study

Long-lasting, excessive stress exposure can have serious health consequences and consequently, to identify potentially harmful consequences, it is important to develop self-report measures of long-lasting stress in everyday life. The complexity of long-lasting excessive stress also raises questions about the efficacy of widely used single-item measures to capture such harmful stress. This study examines the psychometric quality and validity of a brief eight-item scale, measuring long-lasting stress symptoms. Using data from a nationally representative sample, comprising 15,046 working individuals from the 2014 Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH), the findings suggest retaining six of the original eight items, loading on two latent factors: ‘long-lasting perceived stress’ and ‘long-lasting emotional stress’. The high correlation between the two factors suggests the potential for a unified measure to address specific research objectives. The subscales demonstrate concurrent validity with well-established stress-related measures. A single-item measure of perceived stress (‘I have days when I feel stressed all the time’) also correlated with the stress-related measures, although the correlation coefficients were slightly weaker.