Pg no.-269-276
Anju Mehta & Nimisha Beri
Lovely Professional University, Punjab
The stress that is related with cross cultural transition is called acculturative stress.
This stress may be due to homesickness, adapting new language, experiencing racial
discrimination or lack of comfort with the new culture. The present paper deals with
the development and validation of acculturative stress scale after reviewing available
literature on the scale and writing of new items. The development and validation of the
scale was carried out in different steps by using purposive sample. After analyzing the
data of 82 international students studying in India, investigators found that dimensions
of the scale – discrimination, isolation, homesickness, cultural shock, guilt, hate, social
support, poor self image, sad, safety, and academic challenges – were positively
correlated with the total score of acculturative stress. The results of factor analysis
showed that the dimensions of the scale possess adequate psychometric properties. The
internal consistency indices, the alpha coefficient was found 0.896 for the scale. Hence
the scale could be considered as an appropriate measure for assessing acculturative
stress among international students.