Reliability of the Telugu Translation of Perceived Stress Scale in Young adults

The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) has been widely used on various populations across India and the world; however, there is currently no validated or reliable Telugu translation available for young adults who prefer a medium other than English (there is one translation for frontline health workers during Covid-19 by Tikka, S.K., et al. in 2022). This gap limits the accessibility and the ability to accurately assess this demographic. Our study thus aims to create a reliable and valid translation of the Perceived Stress Scale originally developed in 1983 by Cohen et al. in Telugu. For this purpose, we translated the original scale into Telugu following forward-backward method. Both the English and translated Telugu versions were administered to 150 bilingual young adults belonging to the age range of 18-25 from Madanapalle, Andhra Pradesh. We employed Cross-sectional research and convenience, snowball sampling methods to select participants who belong to the age range and are fluent in both languages. We statistically conducted exploratory factor analysis, Cronbach’s alpha for reliability, paired sample t-test, and Pearson correlation to assess the psychometric properties of the translated scale with the help of JAMOVI 2.6.13 and IBM SPSS software. The Telugu version of the perceived stress scale is structurally equivalent, shows acceptable reliability, strong positive correlation, and a statistically significant difference in mean scores according to the paired sample t-test which could have been influenced by language and cultural differences rather than a flaw in the translation itself.