Journal of Behavioral Medicine, Vol. 13, No.

6, 1990

The Inventory of College Students' Recent Life

Experiences: A Decontaminated Hassles Scale
for a Special Population
P a u l M . K o h n , 1 Kathryn Lafreniere, ~ and Maria Gurevich 1

Accepted for publication." April 13, 1990

The development and validation of a new decontaminated hassles measure,

the Inventory o f College Students" Recent Life Experiences, are described.
An initial pool of 85 items was administered to 100 undergraduates along
with the Perceived Stress Scale. Forty-nine items were selected based on sig-
nificant correlations against the Perceived Stress Scale. The alpha reliability
o f the resultant final form of the Inventory o f College Students' Recent Life
Experiences and its correlation against the Perceived Stress Scale were both
high. In a separate cross-replication sample o f 108 undergraduates, the al-
pha reliability of the Inventory and its correlation against the Perceived Stress
Scale showed little shrinkage. Furthermore, separate analyses for male and
female subjects supported the reliability and validity o f the Inventory o f Col-
lege Students" Recent Life Experiences across gender. Factor analysis o f the
Inventory yielded seven interpretable factors. Intercorrelations among sub-
scales based on these factors were generally modest, though in all cases sig-
nificant, suggesting that the Inventory is relatively free o f contamination by
psychological distress.
KEY WORDS: hassles; stress; college students; measurement.

The work reported was facilitated by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada's Small Grant Program, administered by the Office of Research Adminis-
tration, York University. The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Dr.
Norman S. Endler.
tGraduate Programme in Psychology, York University, North York, Ontario, Canada, M3J IP3.
619
0160-7715/90/1200-0619506.00/0 9 1990 Plenum Publishing Corporation
620 Kohn, Lafreniere, and Gurevich

INTRODUCTION

Everyday stressors or "hassles" apparently predict adverse health reac-

tions, physical and mental, even more effectively than do major life events
(Burks and Martin, 1983; De Longis et al., 1982; Eckenrode, 1984; Kanner
et al., 1981; Monroe, 1983; Weinberger et al., 1987). Indeed, Eckenrode
(1984) has even suggested that much of the impact of major life events is
mediated through hassles.
Unfortunately, criticism has abounded that the most commonly used
hassles measure, Kanner and co-workers' (1981) Hassles Scale, is contami-
nated by items and a format which imply distressed physical and mental
responses to stress as well as exposure to daily hassles (e.g., Burks and Martin,
1983; Dohrenwend et al., 1984; Dohrenwend and Shrout, 1985; Green, 1986;
Marziali and Pilkonis, 1986). Some items, for example, refer to alcohol and
drug use, sexual difficulties, physical illness, and personal fears. Further-
more, subjects are specifically asked to indicate how severe the hassles were
which they experienced in the past month, and hassles are explicitly named
and defined as irritants which range "from minor annoyances to fairly major
pressures, problems, or difficulties" (Kanner et al., 1981, p. 25). If impaired
mental health predisposes subjective overreaction to everyday stressors, then
high Hassles Scale scores, given the above instructional context, could result
from either impaired mental health or heavy exposure to everyday stressors.
Subjects' responses to the Hassles Scale could, therefore, reflect the very dis-
turbances in physical and mental health that they are intended to predict.
Clearly, such contamination of the Hassles Scale by items reflecting physical-
and mental-health problems and a format implying subjective distress could
inflate the observed relationships between the Hassles Scale and adverse health
consequences.
It is, therefore, important to develop a measure of exposure to hassles
which is relatively free of such contamination in its items and format (Flan-
nery, 1986). Such a measure should enable one to determine more accurately
the influence of everyday stressors on physical and mental health. Accord-
ingly, we are reporting herein on the development and validation of such
a measure, the Inventory of College Students' Recent Life Experiences
(ICSRLE).
We tailored this measure to college students specifically for two rea-
sons. First, college students are the most commonly utilized population in
personality and other questionnaire-based research (Craik, 1986; Endler and
Parker, 1990). Second, because of peculiarities of the college experience (e.g.,
dealing with professors, teaching assistants, exams, and term papers), it is
often desirable to develop special measures for this population in the area
of stress (e.g., Burks and Martin, 1983; Krantz et al., 1974; Sarason et al.,
1978).
Decontaminated Hassles Measurement 621

A total of 85 items was generated for the initial pool. These were
designed for suitability to a college population, e.g., by references to aca-
demic rather than work situations, although many items are more generally
applicable. We avoided items which were very likely to reflect physical- or
mental-health symptoms or the perception of being stressed.
The items of Kanner et al. (1981) and Burks and Martin (1983) were
considered initially, and some were adapted for use in our initial item pool.
Further items were generated by the first author in an attempt to represent
well major areas of coverage in the scales of Kanner et al. and Burks and
Martin: i.e., academic demands, employment, finances, romantic relation-
ships, friendship, other peer relations, domestic responsibilities, future secu-
rity, and time pressures. We added a further category of competitive standing
(e.g., "dissatisfaction with your mathematical ability"). (To avoid contami-
nation of our own scale, we did not cover the areas of personal health and
some of the inner concerns emphasized by Kanner et al.) Items were gener-
ally brief, e.g., "not enough leisure time," "financial burdens," and "separa-
tion from people you care about."
Instead of calling our measure a "hassles scale," we gave it the innocu-
ous title, "Inventory of College Students' Recent Life Experiences" (ICSRLE).
Also, rather than having subjects rate each item for its severity, we had them
rate the extent of their experience with it over the past month on the follow-
ing 4-point scale: 1 = not at all part of my life; 2 = only slightly part of
my life; 3 = distinctly part of my life; and 4 = very much part of my life.
Our item-selection strategy was to retain only items which correlated
positively and significantly with Cohen and co-workers' (1983) Perceived
Stress Scale, a measure of appraised stress which shared no items with the
ICSRLE. In this way, we ensured that the final form of the ICSRLE would
retain an indirect relationship to the stress-appraisal process which Lazarus
and his associates maintain is a critical determinant of the adverse conse-
quences of stress (e.g., De Longis et al., 1982; Folkman, 1984; Kanner et
al., 1981; Lazarus et al., 1985; Lazarus and Folkman, 1987). We adopted
this "indirect approach" to avoid the potential contamination inherent in
Kanner and co-workers' means of tapping into stress appraisal, namely, the
use of severity ratings.

METHOD

The subjects were 208 undergraduates tested voluntarily and anony-

mously in their psychology classes. There were 50 males, 156 females, and
2 individuals who failed to indicate gender on their questionnaires. (The large
female preponderance is representative of psychology classes at York Univer-
sity.) Subjects' mean reported age was 22.99 (SD = 5.66). The subjects
622 Kohn, Lafreniere, and Gurevich

responded to the initial item pool of the ICSRLE plus Cohen and co-workers'
(1983) Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), a reliable, valid, and widely used mea-
sure of subjectively experienced stress.
For purposes of analysis, the first 100 subjects run constituted the item-
selection subsample and the remaining 108 subjects the cross-replication sub-
sample. Order of running subjects was haphazard with no obvious built-in
biases. Items were retained for the final form of the ICSRLE if they cor-
related significantly with the PSS at a one-tailed alpha of .05 in the item-
selection subsample. (We did not use a more stringent criterion because we
did not necessarily expect all single hassles to correlate very highly with per-
ceived stress.) We selected 49 items for the final form of the ICSRLE, which
appears as the Appendix of this article. Their individual correlations with
the PSS ranged from .17 (p < .05) to .48 (p < .0005).

RESULTS

The means, standard deviations, alpha reliabilities, and intercorrela-

tions of the ICSRLE and the PSS in the item-selection and cross-replication
subsamples appear in Table I. The alpha reliability of the ICSRLE in the
item-selection subsample was ,89, and its correlation against the PSS was
.67 (p < .0005). To correct for possible inflation of these estimates through
capitalization on chance, we cross-replicated them on the remaining subsam-
pie. Here the alpha reliability of the ICSRLE was .88, and its correlation
against the PSS was .59 (p < .0005).
The alpha reliabilities of the ICSRLE for males and females from the
two subsamples combined were .88 and .89, respectively. The correlations
of the ICSRLE with the PSS were .52 for males and .66 for females (p <
.0005 in both cases). These correlations were not reliably different; however,

Table I. Means, Standard Deviations, Reliabilities, and Intercorrelations of

the ICSRLE and the PSS in Two Subsamples a
Item-selection subsample Cross-replication subsample
(n = 100) (n = 108)
ICSRLE PSS ICSRLE PSS
ICSRLE . . . .
PSS .67* - .59* -
M 95.31 25.94 95.74 26.37
SD 17.36 7.56 16.40 7.58
Alpha .89 .83 .88 .85
"ICSRLE, Inventory of College Students' Recent Life Experiences; PSS, Per-
ceived Stress Scale.
*p < .0005.
Decontaminated Hassles Measurement 623

the mean score of women on the I C S R L E (M = 97.15, SD = 16.98) was

significantly higher than that of men ( M = 90.64, SD = 15.85) [t(191) =
2.39, p < .02]. Although the mean score of women on the PSS (M = 26.47,
SD -- 7.81) was also higher than that of men (M = 24.30, SD = 6.84), the
latter difference was not statistically significant [t(191) = 1.81, NS].
To elucidate the overall sex differences on the ICSRLE, we conducted
comparisons on all 49 items. The means and t test results for sex-
differentiating items appear in Table II. Females significantly outscored males
on eight items: "conflict with boyfriend's/girlfriend's/spouse's family," "too
m a n y things to do at once," "not enough time to meet your obligations,"
" i m p o r t a n t d e c i s i o n s a b o u t y o u r e d u c a t i o n , " " c o n f l i c t s with
boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse," "interruptions of your school work," "dissatis-
faction with your physical appearance," and "dissatisfaction with your athletic
skills." There were no items on which men significantly outscored women.
The three most commonly endorsed items for the combined sample were
"too m a n y things to do at once," "important decisions about your future
career," and "important decisions about your education." The proportions
of all subjects who reported at least some exposure to these experiences were
98.6, 94.3, and 94.3~ respectively. However, the variances for these items
were reasonably high because the high percentages of endorsement were dis-
tributed over three degrees of exposure, i.e., "only slightly part of my life,"
"distinctly part of my life," and "very much part of my life."
In relation to the a priori categories used to generate items, the rates
of survival f r o m the initial item pool were as follows: academic, 10/13; era-

Table II. Gender-Differentiating Items of the Inventory of College Students'

Recent Life Experiences
Male Female
Item mean mean t
Conflict with boyfriend's/
girlfriend's/spouse's family 1.48 1.91 3.19"*
Too many things to do at once 3.02 3.29 2.01"
Not enough time to meet your
obligations 2.38 2.66 1.97*
Important decisions about your
education 2.80 3.09 2.04*
Conflicts with boyfriend/
girlfriend/spouse 1.58 1.90 2.30*
Interruptions of your school work 2.02 2.35 2.27*
Dissatisfaction with your
physical appearance 1.96 2.26 2.10"
Dissatisfaction with your
athletic skills 1.40 1.67 2.58*
*p < .05, two-tailed.
**p < .01, two-tailed.
624 Kohn, Lafreniere, and Gurevich

ployment, 1/3; financial, 2/8; romantic, 3/3; friendship, 4/4; other relation-
ships, 12/20; domestic, 2/11; future security, 3/4; time pressure, 6/8;
environment, I/6; and competitive standing, 5/5. Further insight into the
composition of the ICSRLE, notably from the subjects" perspective, is offered
by an item-factor analysis on the full sample's data, summarized in Table
III. It shows for each factor its eigenvalue, the highest loading items, and
the alpha reliability of the corresponding subscale formed by unit-weighting
each contributing item. Principal-axis factoring with an oblimin rotation was
used. (The delta value utilized was zero, the default in SPSSX.) A seven-
factor solution was adopted based on the combined criteria of a minimum
eigenvalue of one, the scree test, and interpretability.
The 10 items loading principally on Factor 1 all concern challenges faced
by college students, most but not all of them academic; accordingly, we in-
terpret Factor 1 in terms of developmental challenge. The seven items load-
ing on Factor 2 all clearly reflected time pressure. Factor 3 was
straightforwardly interpretable as reflecting academic alienation and Factor
4 romantic problems. The five items loading primarily on Factor 5 are diverse
in content and seem more likely to evoke anger than anxiety; hence, we in-
terpret them as reflecting assorted annoyances. The six items loading highest
on Factor 6 were interpreted in terms of general social mistreatment because
they refer to social mistreatment by unspecified persons. Finally, Factor 7
clearly reflects friendship problems.
To determine the interrelationships among the above seven dimensions,
we intercorrelated the scores on the corresponding factor-based subscales.
These were formed by unit-weighting the items with appreciable loadings on
each factor as per Table III. The resulting intercorrelations appear in Table
IV. [We established by serial personal communications with B. P. Dohren-
wend, P. E. Shrout, and A. De Longis that this was the procedure used by
Dohrenwend and Shrout (1985) in their critique of the original Hassles Scale
despite their referring to "factor correlations" in their article.]

DISCUSSION

The need for a decontaminated hassles measure to determine accurate-

ly how much everyday stressors adversely affect physical and mental health
has been evident for some time. Our response to this need, the Inventory
of College Students' Recent Life Experiences, appears adequate in its relia-
bility and validity against the criterion of perceived stress, both across and
within gender. Although the measure applies to a special population, col-
lege undergraduates, the strategies used in constructing and validating the
ICSRLE are more generally applicable. (In fact, a parallel measure for the
general adult population is currently being developed.)
Decontaminated Hassles Measurement 625

Table III. Factor Pattern Loadings for the Inventory of College Students' Recent Life Experiences ~

Factor 1: Developmental Challenge

Struggling to meet your own academic standards .58

Lower grades than yon hoped for .57
Hard effort to get ahead .47
Important decisions about your education .45
Dissatisfaction with your ability at written expression .44
Important decisions about your future career .43
Struggling to meet the academic standards of others ~4!
Dissatisfaction with your mathematical ability .39
Dissatisfaction with your physical appearance .34
Finding courses too demanding .31

Eigenvalue = 8.18 Alpha - .79

Factor 2: Time Pressure

Not enough leisure time .66

Not enough time to meet your obligations .63
A lot of responsibilities .61
Too m a n y things to do at once .60
Heavy demands from extracurricular activities .54
Not enough time for sleep .52
Interruptions of your school work .46

Eigenvalue = 2.69 Alpha = .80

Factor 3: Academic Alienation

Disliking your studies .80

Finding course(s) uninteresting .72
Dissatisfaction with school .63

Eigenvalue = 2.36 Alpha = .79

Factor 4: Romantic Problems

Conflicts with boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse .76

Conflicts with boyfriend's/girlfriend's/spouse's family .67
Decisions about intimate relationship(s) .55

Eigenvalue = 2.23 Alpha = .73

Factor 5: Assorted Annoyances

Getting "ripped off" or cheated in the purchase of services .53

Disliking fellow student(s) .35
Social conflicts over smoking .33
Gossip concerning someone you care about .32
Having your contributions overlooked .31

Eigenvalue = 2.11 Alpha = .47

626 Kohn, Lafreniere, and Gurevich

Table III, Continued

Factor 6: General Social Mistreatment

Social isolation .73

Being taken for granted .61
Being ignored .60
Loneliness .59
Being taken advantage of .52
Social rejection .37

Eigenvalue = 1,87 Alpha = .76

Factor 7: Friendship Problems

Being let down or disappointed by friends .59

Conflicts with friends .56
Having your trust betrayed by a friend .51

Eigenvalue = 1.70 Alpha = .68

aFor ease of interpretation, items are listed within factors in declining order of magnitude for
pattern loadings.

The claim that the ICSRLE is less contaminated by subjective distress

than the Hassles Scale (as should be the case based on item content and
response format) finds support in the modest, if statistically significant, in-
tercorrelations among the ICSRLE's seven factor-based subscales. Dohren-
wend and Shrout (1985) plausibly attributed the very high intercorrelations
among the eight factor-based subscales of the Hassles Scale to their com-
mon contamination by subjective distress. The corresponding correlations
among our subscales were much lower, ranging f r o m . 15 to .49, as ,against
.38 to .71 for the Hassles Scale. Indeed, whereas 20 of the 21 intercorrela-

Table IV. Intercorrelations A m o n g the Seven Factor-Based Subscales for the Inventory of College
Students' Recent Life Experiences ~
Subscale 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
1. Developmental challenge
2. Time pressure .49** -
3. Academic alienation .31"* .25** -
4. Romantic problems .23** .19"* .17"
5. Assorted annoyances .24** .24** .18"* .18"*
6. General social mistreatment .37** .26** .23** .15" .25** --
7. Friendship problems .34** .25** .18"* .19"* .27** .31'*
aThe factor-based subscales were formed by unit-weighting all items for a subscale which
had a pattern loading equal to or greater than .30 on the corresponding factor.
*p < .05, two-tailed.
**p < .01, two-tailed.
Decontaminated Hassles Measurement 627

tions among ICSRLE subscales were under .40, only 1 of the 28 subscale
intercorrelations for the Hassles Scale was that low. Thus, if one accepts
Dohrenwend and Shrout's claim that the very high subscale intercorrelations
of the Hassles Scale reflect contamination by subjective distress, it seems clear
that there must be less such contamination, if any, on the ICSRLE.
The finding that women outscored men on the ICSRLE is consistent
with the report that female adolescents experience marginally more hassles
than their male peers (Tolan et al., 1988). However, similar research on med-
ical students failed to reveal such a difference (Wolf et al., 1987), although
women medical students report more exposure than their male peers to such
specific hassles as isolation, faculty hostility, and pressure to submerge their
personalities and interests to the physician's role (Russo et al., 1985). Sur-
prisingly, given their greater hassles exposure, our female subjects did not
report significantly greater perceived stress than their male peers despite
numerous reports of greater female vulnerability to reactive psychological
distress (e.g., Jick and Mitz, 1985; Lloyd and Gartrell, 1983; Siddique and
D'Arcy, 1984).
Why did our female subjects not report greater perceived stress than
the males, given the women's greater reported exposure to hassles? Exami-
nation of the specific hassles items on which women outscored men shows
considerable diversity of content: time pressure and academic concerns (e.g.,
"too many things to do at once," "important decisions about your education"),
relationship concerns (e.g., "conflict with boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse"), and
attractiveness concerns (e.g., "dissatisfaction with your physical appearance").
It seems not unlikely that the women are as involved with their academic
work, on average, as the men are. However, the women may be more in-
volved than the men with relationship concerns and attractiveness concerns.
This could well result in greater time pressure (and energy demands) on the
women-hence "too many things to do at once." However, the greater salience
of such identities as "physically attractive person" and "partner in a commit-
ted romantic relationship" for women could also serve a stress-buffering func-
tion (Thoits, 1986, 1987) which offsets the hassles entailed by those identities.
Also, the women may be making better use of available social supports, e.g.,
by confiding their problems to friends and by seeking professional help when
needed (Feinson, 1987).
Conceptually, Lazarus and his associates (De Longis et al., 1982; Folk-
man, 1984; Kanner et al., 1981; Lazarus et al., 1985; Lazarus and Folkman,
1987) have emphasized the importance of the cognitive appraisal of stress-
fulness in mediating the impact of hassles on their consequences to well-being.
It could, however, be claimed that the very attempt to tap appraisal via the
severity ratings on Kanner and co-workers' (1981) Hassles Scale contributes
substantially to its contamination by adverse consequences (Dohrenwend and
Shrout, 1985; Reich et al., 1988), as we argued in the Introduction. Our m e a -
628 Kohn, Lafreniere, and Gurevich

surement of exposure to hassles as against their subjective impact circum-

vents this difficulty. Yet the hassles to which exposure is measured are ones
which demonstrably relate to appraised stress as measured by the PSS. Thus,
our measure avoids contamination without entirely losing its relationship to
the appraisal process.
A further disadvantage of the approach of Lazarus and his associates
is that it may well obscure any interactive relationship between hassles and
personality factors in determining adverse consequences to well-being. This
is because such personality factors as trait anxiety and locus of control prob-
ably affect the appraisal of hassles and thereby the severity of their conse-
quences. Thus, building appraisal directly into hassles measurement should
result in an underestimation of the role of such personality factors. This
should occur specifically because appraised stress would be credited with ac-
counting for variance which would be attributed to hassles x personality
interactions if a hassles index had been used which measured primarily ex-
posure rather than appraisal, e.g., the ICSRLE. This is quite apart from the
inflation of effects apparently attributable to hassles through contamination
of the original Hassles Scale by content and a format directly reflecting ad-
verse consequences. We would, therefore, advocate directly assessing the ap-
praisal of stress separately from exposure to hassles, if at all.

APPENDIX

Table AI. Inventory of College Students' Recent Life Experiences (ICSRLE)

Following is a list of experiences which m a n y students have some time or other. Please
indicate for each experience how m u c h it has been a part of your life over t h e p a s t m o n t h . Put
a "1" in the space provided next to an experience if it was n o t at a l l p a r t of your life over the
past m o n t h (e.g., "trouble with mother in l a w - 1 "); "2" for an experience which was only slightly
part of your life over that time; "3" for an experience which was distinctly part of your life;
and "4" for an experience which was very m u c h part of your life over the past month.

I n t e n s i t y o f E x p e r i e n c e over P a s t M o n t h
1 = n o t at all part of my life
2 = o n l y slightly part of m y life
3 = distinctly part of m y life
4 = very m u c h part of m y life

1. Conflicts with boyfriend's/girlfriend's/spouse's family

2. Being let down or disappointed by friends
3. Conflict with professor(s)
4. Social rejection
5. Too m a n y things to do at once
6. Being taken for granted
7. Financial conflicts with family members
8. Having your trust betrayed by a friend
Decontaminated Hassles Measurement 629

Table A1. Continued

9. Separation from people you care about
10. Having your contributions overlooked
11. Struggling to meet your own academic standards
12. Being taken advantage of
13. Not enough leisure time
14. Struggling to meet the academic standards of others
15. A lot of responsibilities
t6. Dissatisfaction with school
17. Decisions about intimate relationship(s)
18. Not enough time to meet your obligations
19. Dissatisfaction with your mathematical ability
20. Important decisions about your future career
21. Financial burdens
22. Dissatisfaction with your reading ability
23. Important decisions about your education
24. Loneliness
25. Lower grades than you hoped for
26. Conflict with teaching assistant(s)
27. Not enough time for sleep
28. Conflicts with your family
29. Heavy demands from extracurricular activities
30. Finding courses too demanding
31. Conflicts with friends
32. Hard effort to get ahead
33. Poor health of a friend
34. Disliking your studies
35. Getting "ripped off" or cheated in the purchase of services
36. Social conflicts over smoking
37. Difficulties with transportation
38. Disliking fellow student(s)
39. Conflicts with boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse
40. Dissatisfaction with your ability at written expression
41. Interruptions of your school work
42. Social isolation
43. Long waits to get service (e.g., at banks, stores, etc.)
44. Being ignored
45. Dissatisfaction with your physical appearance
46. Finding course(s) uninteresting
47. Gossip concerning someone you care about
48. Failing to get expected job
49. Dissatisfaction with your athletic skills

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