Development and Validation of Stressful Life Events Scale for Children in Pakistan

The aim of study was to develop an indigenous, valid, and reliable self-report measure to identify stressful life events in children with age range from 9 through 13 years. An initial item pool of 110 items was generated through interviews with children, whereas a preliminary questionnaire was administered to clinical psychologists, parents, and teachers. For the empirical evaluation, a sample of 1132 children (with a dropout rate of 12.9%) was drawn from five schools in Lahore including 632 boys and 500 girls. Principal Component Factor Analysis with Varimax rotation was used to determine the construct validity along with running item analysis. As a result, five factors emerged that explained 41% total variance containing total 61 items on selection criteria of item loading of .45 and above loading exclusively on one factor. These factors were labeled as trauma related stressors, social stressors, familial stressors, emotional stressors, and personal stressors. Total Stressful Life Event Scale for Children showed alpha reliability of .96; while, it ranged from .80 to .96 for its five subscales with significant inter-correlations with each other. Hence, Stressful Life Event Scale for Children may be used as a reliable and valid selfreport measure for assessing stressful life events in children.