Through a collaborative effort led by Phillip Sherlock, PhD from Northwestern University, an ECHO research team developed a short-form version of the Crisis in Family Systems-Revised (CRISYS-R) questionnaire for evaluating the sources of stress that adults experience. The study found that the revised 24-question survey (CRISYS-SF) covered the same 11 areas of stress the 80-question CRISYS-R addressed and yielded very similar scores. The article, titled “A short form of the Crisis in Family Systems (CRISYS) in a racially diverse sample of pregnant women,” is published in Current Psychology.
The researchers interviewed 884 pregnant women in the PRogramming of Intergenerational Stress Mechanisms (PRISM) study from New York City and Boston. About 20% of these women spoke Spanish as their primary language, 20% had less than a high school education, and 60% reported having some degree of financial trouble. The participants answered all 80 of the CRISYS-R questions, and the researchers used statistical methods and expert input to identify which questions were the most useful for measuring stress.
Growing evidence suggests that exposure to stress can affect a patient’s overall health. The CRISYS-SF is a convenient method for doctors and researchers to more easily screen for participant stress, identify the sources of that stress, and plan effective interventions.
“Factors including questionnaire length contribute to participant burden,” said Dr. Sherlock, “and this burden can contribute to reduced response rate, incomplete data, and reduced data quality in clinical studies.” Future research into the effects of stress on specific health outcomes will benefit from the use of the CRISYS-SF questionnaire to gather reliable, high quality data on participant stress.