The Hassles Assessment Scale for Students in College: Measuring the frequency and unpleasantness of and dwelling on stressful events

Development of the Hassles Assessment Scale for Students in College, a new scale to measure students' stress, is described. In the scale, students rat e 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 dwell ing measures were found. Correlational analyses demonstrated the scale's cr iterion validity (scores were negatively correlated with the number of hour s respondents reported engaging in physical exercise) and congruent validit y (scores were positively correlated with scores on the Inventory of Colleg e Students' Recent Life Experiences, an established scale for assessing stu dent hassles). Exploratory factor analyses suggested the possibility that m any items on the scale are independent, with each contributing some specifi c variance to the total variance of the item pool that is not shared with o ther items.