The digital stress scale: cross-cultural application, validation, and development of a short scale

Growing global mobile and social media use in private and work life increases users’ proneness to digital stress, potentially undermining important behavioral outcomes. Past research efforts led to the development of a 24-item digital stress scale (DSS), developed among U.S. adolescents and young adults. Responding to calls for more replication studies and parsimonious measures in the field, our research objectives are threefold: (1) to develop an almost 60% shortened version of the original 24-item DSS; (2) to provide a cross-cultural validation of the long and short DSS using samples from three distinct countries, Germany, Italy, and Japan; (3) to assess the generalizability of the scale to a different population by applying the long and short DSS to samples of non-adolescents (i.e., employees). The validation procedures confirm the reliability, validity, and cross-national applicability of the 10-item DSS. Our application of the scale to employees also demonstrates the impact of perceived digital stress on work-related (i.e., burnout; intention to quit), family-related (i.e., family satisfaction), and domain unspecific (i.e., psychological strain) employee outcomes, thus emphasizing the relevance of digital stress to employee well-being. We offer theoretical and practical implications.