title: Assessing perceived stress in medical personnel: in search of an appropriate scale for the bengali population.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The occurrence of stress and stress related anxiety and depression in medical personnel are being increasingly reported in literature. The perceived stress scale (PSS) is the most widely used psychological instrument for measuring the perception of stress. It is needed to assess perceived stress in our population using appropriately translated version of PSS. The objectives of study were to prepare a Bengali version of PSS-10 and to establish its psychometric properties in the study population.
  
  
  METHODS
  The study was conducted in a teaching hospital among medical students and interns (N=37). The translated Bengali version and the original English version of PSS-10 were separately handed over to the individual subjects. The scores were compared across different subgroups and psychometric properties of the translated version were assessed using SPSS 16.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Internal consistency of PSS English (α=0.79) and Bengali (α=0.80) was satisfactory. Intra-rater reliability was adequate (κ>0.5) for most of the items, but showed an inadequate value (κ<0.5) for four items on the scale. After deleting these four items from the Bengali version, a new six-item PSS in Bengali was derived that showed good internal consistency (α=0.699).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This new version needs to be validated in a larger study population. Perceived stress score using PSS-10 was considerably high in our study population, although there was no significant difference between the subgroups (male/female, intern/student).
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Burdwan Medical College, West Bengal, India.
authors.forename: Amrita
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chakraborti
authors.forename: Prasenjit
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ray
authors.forename: Debasish
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sanyal
authors.forename: Rajarshi Guha
authors.initials: RG
authors.lastname: Thakurta
authors.forename: Amit K
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Bhattacharayya
authors.forename: Asim Kumar
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Mallick
authors.forename: Ranjan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Das
authors.forename: Syed Naiyer
authors.initials: SN
authors.lastname: Ali
keywords: Perceived stress scale; psychometric property; translation