The Hispanic Stress Inventory Version 2: Improving the Assessment of Acculturation Stress

Abstract

This paper reports on a two-phase study to revise the Hispanic Stress Inventory (HSI) (Cervantes, Padilla, & Salgado de Snyder, 1991). The necessity for a revised stress-assessment instrument was determined by demographic and political shifts affecting Latin American immigrants and later-generation Hispanics in the U.S. in the two decades since the development of the HSI. The data for the revision of the HSI (termed the HSI2) was collected in four sites: Los Angeles, El Paso, Miami, and Boston and included 941 immigrants and 575 US-born Hispanics and a diverse population of Hispanic subgroups. The immigrant version of the HSI2 includes 10 stress subscales, while the US-born version includes 6 stress subscales. Both versions of the HSI2 are shown to possess satisfactory Cronbach alpha reliabilities and demonstrate expert-based content validity, as well as concurrent validity when correlated with subscales of the Brief Symptom Inventory and the Patient Health Questionnaire. The new HSI2 instruments are recommended for use by clinicians and researchers interested in assessing psychosocial stress among diverse Hispanic populations of various ethnic subgroups, age groups, and geographic location.