Thai Adaptation and Validation of the Perceived Stress Scale

The PSS-10[8 ] measures the degree to which one perceives aspects of one's life as uncontrollable, unpredictable, and overloading. Participants are asked to respond to each question on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (never) to 4 (very often), indicating how often they have felt or thought a certain way within the past month. Scores range from 0 to 40, with higher composite scores indicative of greater perceived stress. The PSS-10 has demonstrated good internal consistency[8 ].
In this Thai version, the authors translated the original version into Thai language with cultural adaptations, and then this was back-translated by an English-Thai bilingual school teacher, who had no knowledge of the wording of the original English version of the PSS-10. The two versions were then compared item-by-item and minor discrepancies were addressed and corrected by a consensus of the authors and the school teacher. Thirty individuals including relatives of patients, psychiatric patients and students (in different courses and years), who were not participating in the study, were asked to complete the Thai version PSS for a pilot study. Additional grammatical errors and misspellings were subsequently corrected. The revising procedure was performed once with acceptable results before field-testing began.