The Chinese version of the Digital Stress Scale: Evaluation of psychometric properties

Digital stress describes the stress and anxiety that accompanies notifications and alerts from and the usage of mobile and social media. According to recent studies, digital stress may help to explain the various effects of social media usage on psychological and behavioral outcomes. The Digital Stress Scale (DSS) is a psychometrically reliable measure of digital stress. The present study translated the DSS into Chinese and examined its psychometric properties among Chinese young adults. The results exhibited that the DSS was best characterized by a bifactor Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (bifactor-ESEM) representation, which includes one general factor of digital stress and the combination of five specific factors which are Availability Stress, Approval Anxiety, Fear of Missing Out, Connection Overload, and Online Vigilance. The measurement and structural invariance of the bifactor-ESEM solution were demonstrated across male and female groups. Reliabilities of the general factor and specific factors of the DSS were sound with high Cronbach’s alpha and MacDonald’s coefficient omega. Convergent validity was supported by the associations between DSS and measures of psychological stress, depression, and mindfulness. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.