The Hispanic Stress Inventory Version 2: Improving the Assessment of Acculturation Stress

This article reports on a 2-phase study to revise the Hispanic Stress Inventory (HSI; Cervantes, Padilla, & Salgado de Snyder, 1991). The necessity for a revised stress-assessment instrument was determined by demographic and political shifts affecting Latin American immigrants and later-generation Hispanics in the United States in the 2 decades since the development of the HSI. The data for the revision of the HSI (termed the HSI2) was collected at 4 sites: Los Angeles, El Paso, Miami, and Boston, and included 941 immigrants and 575 U.S.-born Hispanics and a diverse population of Hispanic subgroups. The immigrant version of the HSI2 includes 10 stress subscales, whereas the U.S.-born version includes 6 stress subscales. Both versions of the HSI2 are shown to possess satisfactory Cronbach's alpha reliabilities and demonstrate expert-based content validity, as well as concurrent validity when correlated with subscales of the Brief Symptom Inventory (Derogatis, 1993) and the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (Kroenke, Spitzer, & Williams, 2001). The new HSI2 instruments are recommended for use by clinicians and researchers interested in assessing psychosocial stress among diverse Hispanic populations of various ethnic subgroups, age groups, and geographic location.