Adaptation and validation of a scale of sources of stress in Peruvian dental student

Introduction: At the higher education level, dental students face various academic, clinical and personal challenges that can generate high levels of stress, affecting their well-being and performance. Therefore, it is important to have validated instruments to identify and evaluate the main sources of stress. Materials and methods: Instrumental study with the voluntary participation of 173 students of both sexes of the stomatology course of a private university in Peru. The instrument to be validated was the Dental Environment Stress (DES), made up of 30 items distributed in 4 dimensions. Aiken's V coefficient was used to assess content-based validity, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to assess internal structure and Cronbach's Alpha coefficient for reliability. Results: All items received a favorable evaluation by the judges (V > 0.70). When applying the CFA, adequate goodness-of-fit indices were obtained: χ² = 678.314, p < 0.001, gl = 399, χ²/df = 2.42, CFI = 0.991, TLI = 0.990, RMSEA = 0.052 and SRMR = 0.062, from which, it can be deduced that the model obtained a good fit and it fits well with the data. Finally, the reliability of the total scale and its dimensions was very good (ω > 0.80). Conclusion: The sources of stress scale demonstrate adequate psychometric properties, therefore, it can be useful for the management of the training of qualified human resources in dentistry.