Measuring Stressors Among Children and Adolescents: A Scoping Review 1956–2020

Abstract

Children and adolescents are confronted with a variety of stressful experiences that may impact their developmental and learning processes. Yet, little is known about the way stressors actually are measured in research. To bridge this gap, this study conducted a scoping review of measures indexing child and adolescent stressors (N = 56). The results shed light on key fundamental dimensions that undergird the definition of stressors (space and time, quantification of stressfulness) and on the qualities of existing measures (content validity, composite reliability, convergent validity, and criterion validity), but also on their limitations for conducting quantitative research on youth stress processes (e.g., overreliance on long checklists or interviews, lack of demonstrated measurement invariance). Implications are drawn for the development of more integrative and efficient measures of stressors.