Escala de estresse acadêmico: avaliando a estabilidade dos parâmetros psicométricos na pandemia

Abstract

Academic stress is a variable that has a negative impact on the lives of university students. From that, the study aimed to investigate a possibility of the new daily stressor derived from the COVID-19 pandemic impacting on the psychometric parameters of the Academic Stress Scale (ASS). To this end, there were two samples, in the first sample, called pre-pandemic, 306 university students participated and was collected in 2018. The sample collected in the pandemic period has 337 university students and is called in-pandemic, being collected among 2020 and 2021. In the first moment, we sought to study the individual parameters of the items and to validate the instrument's factorial in the pre-pandemic and pandemic context. The results shows that in some moments the parameters of discrimination and difficulty obtained better rates in the sample in the pandemic, however the results were quite similar, the factorial structure remained the same with excellent adjustment rates. In the second part of the study, we sought to investigate the factorial invariance of the instrument with the Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MGCFA) technique, derived from the Classic Test Theory (CTT) and the Differential Item Functioning (DIF), which has as based on Item Response Theory (IRT). The findings of the two moments indicate configural and metric invariance among university students with a single and mixed shift. The DIF indicated, in the pre-pandemic sample, item 12 with uniform DIF, the in-pandemic sample had item 9 with uniform DIF, it is important to highlight that the impact of the items with DIF in the rest of the instrument was insignificant. Therefore, it can be inferred that the ASS did not suffer negative influences regarding the psychometric parameters with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, thus being an instrument with psychometric robustness and that can be used to measure the construct in university students in further studies.