Poverty-Related Stress Scale

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Abstract

The poverty-related stress Scale (PRSS) is a newly developed psychometric instrument designed to capture the multifaceted nature of stress experienced by individuals living in impoverished conditions. Historically, the psychological assessment of poverty-related stress has been hindered by reliance on unidimensional tools that primarily focus on financial strain, often neglecting the broader environmental and psychosocial burdens of poverty. The PRSS addresses this critical gap by providing a comprehensive, multidimensional framework that evaluates specific stressors unique to low-income environments, such as housing instability and environmental noise, alongside traditional financial worries.

Developed through a rigorous, multi-study validation process, the PRSS represents a significant advancement in behavioral health research. By utilizing modern psychometric techniques like exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM), the creators established a robust hierarchical structure. This allows researchers and clinicians to not only assess an overarching factor of poverty-related stress but also to pinpoint specific domains of distress. Ultimately, the PRSS serves as a vital tool for understanding how systemic inequalities and resource deprivation translate into adverse mental health outcomes, paving the way for more targeted interventions and informed public policy.

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Keywords
poverty-related stress
socioeconomic status
psychometrics
behavioral health
ESEM
Depression
Anxiety

πŸ“Š Psychometric Scorecard

Structure
Multidimensional
Validation Country
πŸ“ United States

Authors

πŸ‘€ Brianna Allen
πŸ‘€ Jeffrey Klibert
βœ‰ [email protected]
πŸ› Georgia Southern University
πŸ‘€ Llewellyn E. van Zyl

Purpose

The primary purpose of the PRSS is to provide a psychometrically sound, adult-focused measure of the chronic and toxic stressors associated with living in poverty. Previous instruments, such as the Economic Hardship Questionnaire, often lacked rigorous validation, focused too narrowly on economic factors, or were primarily normed on adolescent populations. This left a significant void in the literature regarding how Adults uniquely experience and internalize the systemic burdens of poverty. The PRSS fills this void by offering a validated tool that captures the nuanced, intersecting challenges of resource deprivation. For clinicians and researchers, this instrument is essential for accurately mapping the pathways through which socioeconomic disparities degrade behavioral health, enabling a more precise evaluation of how poverty-related stress drives conditions like Depression and Anxiety while undermining psychological flourishing.

Construct

The psychological construct of poverty-related stress encompasses the cumulative, chronic burdens that arise from living in resource-depleted environments. Grounded in social causation theory and the family stress model, this construct posits that poverty exerts its detrimental effects on mental health primarily through prolonged exposure to systemic stressors. Unlike general life stress, poverty-related stress involves additive, context-specific challenges that overwhelm an individual’s coping mechanisms and regulatory systems.

The PRSS operationalizes this construct through a multidimensional lens, identifying three distinct but interrelated sub-domains: financial distress, housing dysfunction, and noise disturbance. Financial distress captures the traditional economic strains of poverty, while housing dysfunction and noise disturbance account for the physical and environmental hazards prevalent in low-income communities. Together, these dimensions form a hierarchical model where specific environmental and economic stressors feed into a broader, overarching experience of poverty-related stress.

Validity

The validation of the PRSS was established through a comprehensive longitudinal approach, utilizing an initial sample of 470 participants at baseline and retaining 219 participants for follow-up to examine both concurrent and predictive validity. Researchers demonstrated that the scale’s overarching construct and its specific sub-dimensions are significantly associated with theoretically relevant behavioral health outcomes. Specifically, concurrent validity was supported by strong correlations between PRSS scores and elevated levels of Depression and Anxiety, as well as diminished levels of psychological flourishing.

Furthermore, the instrument exhibited robust predictive validity; baseline measurements of poverty-related stress successfully accounted for longitudinal variations in these mental health indices at a subsequent time point. This temporal predictive capability underscores the scale’s utility in tracking the developmental trajectory of internalizing symptoms and well-being over time, aligning perfectly with theoretical expectations regarding the toxic, compounding effects of poverty on mental health.

Convergent & Discriminant Validation Correlations

Reference Instrument Correlation Coefficient (r)
Depression measures
Anxiety measures
Flourishing measures

Reliability

Reliability evidence for the PRSS is robust, demonstrating both strong internal consistency and temporal stability across multiple independent samples. Through rigorous psychometric evaluation during the initial scale development phases, the instrument and its underlying sub-dimensions exhibited high internal consistency, indicating that the items reliably measure their intended constructs without excessive error variance.

Additionally, the researchers established temporal invariance, confirming that the scale measures poverty-related stress consistently over time. This longitudinal stability is a critical psychometric property, as it ensures that any observed changes in stress levels are attributable to true fluctuations in the individual’s environment or psychological state, rather than measurement error or shifting interpretations of the items.

Factor Analysis

The factor structure of the PRSS was rigorously evaluated across multiple independent samples, including an initial exploratory phase with 206 participants and a subsequent validation phase with 400 individuals. The psychometric analyses consistently supported a hierarchical Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM) framework, which proved superior in capturing the complex, dynamic interactions among the scale’s dimensions.

This hierarchical structure features a general, overarching factor of poverty-related stress, underpinned by three specific first-order factors: noise disturbance, housing dysfunction, and financial distress. The use of ESEM is particularly notable, as it allows for a more flexible and realistic representation of multidimensional psychological constructs by permitting cross-loadings, thereby providing a better fit to the data than traditional, overly restrictive confirmatory factor analysis models. This advanced analytical approach ensures that the PRSS accurately reflects the nuanced reality of poverty-related stressors.

Subscales

Subscale Items Description
Noise Disturbance Measures stress related to significant noise disturbances within the home and community environment.
Housing Dysfunction Measures stress stemming from crowded living spaces, physical hazards, and inadequate shelter conditions.
Financial Distress Measures stress associated with economic hardship, financial restrictions, and difficulties obtaining basic resources.

Instrument

Test Type Self-report questionnaire
Language English
Population Adults, General population
Age Group Adults
Administration Self-administered

Sample

Study 1 included 206 participants to establish the factor structure. Study 2 included 400 participants to evaluate factorial validity and temporal invariance. Study 3 included 470 participants at Time 1 and 219 participants at Time 2 to examine criterion validity.

πŸ“„
Cite This Paper

Brianna Allen, Jeffrey Klibert, Llewellyn E. van Zyl (2023). poverty-related stress Scale. Depression and Anxiety. https://doi.org/10.1155/2023/6659030

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Poverty-Related Stress Scale Items

Response Format: 1 = Never, 2 = Sometimes, 3 = Often, 4 = Always

Noise Disturbance

Measures stress related to significant noise disturbances within the home and community environment.

  1. I had difficulty sleeping or doing other important things due to noise disturbances inside my home (e.g., crying infants and loud family members).
  2. I had difficulty sleeping or doing other important things due to noise disturbances outside my home (e.g., loud neighbors, construction, neighborhood violence, public transportation, and car alarms).
  3. I was reluctant to go home or return home because the noise in my house was uncomfortably loud.
  4. I felt the need to get up and leave when it became noisy in my house.
  5. I have felt stressed, irritable, or fatigued by the noise in my home.

Housing Dysfunction

Measures stress stemming from crowded living spaces, physical hazards, and inadequate shelter conditions.

  1. Maintenance workers have condemned or threatened to condemn my home due to structural problems, poor maintenance, or other physical hazards associated with the building itself.
  2. My family and I have been threatened with eviction.
  3. I avoid people living in my home as much as possible.
  4. I have not felt as close to a family member or family friend because they are in jail.
  5. I had to take advantage of available garbage bins, charities, soup kitchens, or free events in order to eat.
  6. I have been forced to stay in a homeless shelter, church, other public place, or another person’s home.

Financial Distress

Measures stress associated with economic hardship, financial restrictions, and difficulties obtaining basic resources.

  1. I had to let go of some hopes and dreams to meet my most basic needs (shelter, food, clothing, etc.)
  2. I have worried about how difficult it would be to move if I had to move suddenly.
  3. Financial stress has negatively impacted my family’s relationship.
  4. I had to sacrifice or make tough decisions because of a lack of money.

Scoring: Subscale scores are calculated by summing or averaging the responses to the items within each respective subscale (Noise Disturbance: Items 1-5; Housing Dysfunction: Items 6-11; Financial Distress: Items 12-15). A total score can be calculated by summing all 15 items. Higher scores indicate higher levels of poverty-related stress. There are no reverse-scored items on this scale.

Cite this article

Mohammed looti (2026). Poverty-Related Stress Scale. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. Retrieved from https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/poverty-related-stress-scale/

Mohammed looti. "Poverty-Related Stress Scale." PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, 12 Aug. 2026, https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/poverty-related-stress-scale/.

Mohammed looti. "Poverty-Related Stress Scale." PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, 2026. https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/poverty-related-stress-scale/.

Mohammed looti (2026) 'Poverty-Related Stress Scale', PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. Available at: https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/poverty-related-stress-scale/.

[1] Mohammed looti, "Poverty-Related Stress Scale," PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, vol. X, no. Y, Ψ΅ Z-Z, August, 2026.

Mohammed looti. Poverty-Related Stress Scale. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. 2026;vol(issue):pages.

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