Introduction:

The high prevalence of stress-related mental disorders among healthcare workers requires timely assessment and intervention. Accordingly, valid, reliable, and easy-to-administer instruments are required for this purpose. This study aimed to adapt and validate the T3/15 Tension Questionnaire by Meliá (1994) in a sample of Peruvian healthcare workers.

Materials and methods:

In this instrumental study, 302 workers from the Peruvian health system selected through stratified random sampling were included. The process included changes in the terminology of some items, content evaluation by judges, and pilot testing. Construct validity was assessed via exploratory factor analysis; the number of factors was defined using Horn's parallel analysis and the fit using confirmatory factor analysis.

Results:

A reduced version of 10 items was finally obtained, which were grouped into two factors that explained 67.13% of the total variance and an acceptable adjustment (x2/gl = 3.08; NFI = 0.94; CFI = 0.95; SRMR = 0.013; RMSEA = 0.080 [ic90% = 0.66-0.10]). The items in the questionnaire satisfactorily discriminated according to the variable sex and occupational group. Ordinal alpha for sociopsychological incidences of stress at work was 0.752 and 0.931 for work-induced stress and McDonald's Omega was 0.867 and 0.965, respectively.

Conclusions:

The new reduced version of the stress questionnaire demonstrates acceptable metric properties and hence can be recommended for assessing the state of occupational stress among healthcare workers and validation studies.

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