This study aims to investigate the psychometric attributes of DASS21 instrument of depression, anxiety, and stress among Malaysian university undergraduate students, where negative emotional disturbance is evaluated in the respect of frequency and severity. During this study, English and Malay were the languages used for the descriptive investigation on the severity of emotional disturbance and psychometrics analysis. A cross-sectional study was conducted among (N = 390) undergraduate students from Universiti Putra Malaysia, through a simple random exercise. This was followed by collection of data on the final respondents through AMOS for confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and measurement. An excellent structure of the 21-items in three DASS21 sub-constructs was displayed, with 18 out of 21 items were produced from adequate construct validity. It exhibited a positive factor loading, which amounted to 0.5 and higher. In terms of internal consistency, the alpha values for anxiety (?= 0.850), stress (?= 0.859), and depression (?= 0.910) were shown. A positive consistency of Cronbach’s Alpha (?= 0.926) could also be seen from the overall score where all items were included. Thus, DASS21 can be utilized as a measurement tool to identify the health condition of students with negative emotional disturbances.
Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s)
Published by Human Resource Management Academic Research Society (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
