Chronic and acute stress index: validation of a new measure to evaluate stress in romantic relationship

The present study aims to investigate the effects that minor stressors could have on the marital relationship quality. Romantic partners can experience stress that originates outside or within their relationship. Bodenmann’s stress-divorce model (2005) offers an understanding on how everyday stressors can affect partners within a romantic relationship and can lead to relationship dissolution. In case of internal stressors, the stress can crossover from one partner to the other because of his/her reactions to stress itself. In case of external stressors, the stress can affect only one partner and if he/she isn’t able to cope it, the stress can spillover to the other partner, transforming an individual stress into a couple problem (Bodenmann, Falconier, Randall, 2016). The present study aims to validate the Chronic and Acute Stress Index (CASI), a 16-items measure, originally developed by another self-report (Isolani, et al., 2018), designed to evaluate types of stressors that individuals currently in a romantic relationship may experience in the last 7 days (acute stressor) or 12 months (chronic stressor). Data collection is ongoing and is anticipated will be completed by May 2019. Currently, we have collected data from 197 individuals (144 = women, 53 = men) with a mean age of 38,83 years (ds=11,49), married or cohabitating from at least 2 years with a mean relationship duration of 13,61 years (ds=11,22). We run a factorial analysis on CASI to identify significant factors in the Italian population. The four factors have named ‘acute spillover’ (α = .656), ‘chronic spillover’ (α = .684), ‘acute crossover’ (α= .765) and ‘chronic crossover’ (α= .750). CASI showed a strong divergent validity with Dyadic Coping Inventory (DCI; Bodenmann, 2008), with correlation between -.23 and -.37. Correlation with couple satisfaction was -.193 in case of acute crossover and -.25 in case of chronic crossover. Correlation with PANAS showed that our instrument had a better measurement of acute negative affect (correlation between .20 and .32) rather than chronic negative affect (correlation between .20 and .26). We intend to apply CASI even in future studies on couples in crisis, with also a cross-cultural perspective between Italian and US sample.