DU students invent scale to measure stress levels

Many youngsters of the modern era are troubled by lingering sadness or hopelessness, and undergo change in sleeping or eating habits. These symptoms may indicate depression, but how does one know for sure? A scale which measures the level of depression, invented by the students of Delhi University’s (DU) Bharti College might provide a solution.

The ‘Assessing Stress Scale among Youth’ (ASSY) project is a part of DU’s flagship innovation programme initiated by the former Vice-Chancellor Dinesh Singh. The project was given approval in September 2015 and received a grant of around Rs 3.5 lakh from the university.

According to the research team co-coordinator Deepika Dewan, ASSY is designed to calculate the levels of depression among young adults between the ages of 18 and 35, by using questionnaires for the project. “The ASSY is a measure of the degree to which situations in one’s life are appraised as stressful. Items were designed to assess how unpredictable, uncontrollable, and overloaded respondents find their lives to be,” Dewan said. She added: “Before rolling out the full research, a pilot study was conducted by the team and the result was overwhelming. The team worked on samples of youth and found that innovative and creative minds can show maximum efficiency only when they are free of stress.”

“Initially, the team stressed on the questions related to personal relationships, sexual life, peer pressure, parental pressure, etc while studying the factors responsible for stress among the population. But gradually, other reasons surfaced like medical problems, gender bias etc. After identifying the symptoms we also worked on stress-busters,” Rekha Sapra, a co-investigator of the ASSY team said. 

According to the team, the objective behind aggregating a sizeable sample of youth was to address the age group of 18-33, which is more prone to stress than other age groups – after the age of 33 stress levels tend to reduce.

Statistics reveal that in India an average of about 46,000 suicides occur every year. In 2012, most deaths due to suicide occurred in the age groups of 15-29. The research is in its final stage and the results will be out very soon. The research will enable individuals to self-assess their stress levels by using the ASSY tool.