Objective: To validate in Spanish the Perceived Stress Questionnaire (PSQ), a questionnaire to assess stress for research purposes in psychosomatic patients.
Method: The test was administered to a healthy population (N=174) of nursing students and health workers and to a clinical sample (N=80) of patients attending a psychiatric outpatient consultation.
Results: Concurrent validity: General and Recent PSQ scores correlated high with trait anxiety (r=.65), moderate with depression (r=.46) and psychological disturbance (r=.51) and poor with state anxiety (r=.22). Predictive validity: PSQ scores were higher in "psychiatric cases" than in "psychiatric noncases" (P<.01), and correlated highly with somatic symptoms of psychological origin (r=.62) in the clinical subsample. Internal consistency was 0.9 for the General and 0.87 for the Recent PSQ. Test-retest reliability of the General PSQ was 0.80.
Discussion: The Spanish version of PSQ presents good psychometric properties and it seems to be a valuable instrument for psychosomatic researchers.