RESEARCH IN BRIEF The stress in nursing students scale (SINS): principal components analysis of longitudinal data from Hong Kong Roger Watson, Ian J Deary, David R Thompson and Gloria Li Accepted for publication: 11 November 2009 Aim The aim of this study is to investigate the psychometric structure of the Stress in Nursing Students Scale (SINS) using a cohort of nursing students in Hong Kong who were tested on two occasions and to compare the structure obtained with a previously derived structure in a separate and culturally contrasting sample. Background Stress in nursing students is a well-defined phenomenon, has been widely studied and is an issue of concern in the profession (Watson et al. 2009). Stress in nursing students arises out of a range of reasons including educational, personal, clinical and financial worries (Deary et al. 2003). A wide range of instruments is available to measure stress with some specific to nursing and some to nursing students. One such instrument, the SINS, developed by Deary et al. (2003), was first used in a longitudinal study of nursing students in Scotland. The SINS is a 43-item questionnaire covering clinical, confidence, edu- cational and financial sources of stress. Questions in the SINS ask about sources of stress, for example ‘The amount of classwork material to be learned’, and ask the nursing student to respond on a five-point scale from ‘Not at all stressful = 1’ to ‘Extremely stressful = 5’. Principal components analysis of the SINS (Deary et al. 2003) suggested a four-‘factor’ struc- ture with factors measuring all of the above dimensions: clinical, confidence, educational and financial. The best 33 of the original 43 items were retained in the final analysis and provide a recommended questionnaire for further research. This paper reports the use of the SINS in a study of stress in nursing students in Hong Kong that has already been reported (Watson et al. 2008). Whereas the test–retest reliability of the SINS was reported to be adequate by Watson et al. (2008), this study applies principal components analysis to compare the psychometric structure of the questionnaire obtained in Scotland with that obtained in Hong Kong. In a world of increasing workforce mobility, especially in nursing, it is essential to test questionnaires like the SINS under different geographical and cultural conditions ultimately to establish its construct validity. Methods Data were gathered using the SINS from a cohort of nursing students in Hong Kong – as decribed by Watson et al. (2008) – at two time points, 18 months apart (Time 1, n = 158; Time 2, n = 147). Data were entered into an SPSS SPSS database (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA), and the 33 items retained in the final analysis of Deary et al. (2003) were analysed using principal components analysis (PCA) (Watson & Thompson 2006). Although this differs from factor analysis, it is common to use the term ‘factor’ to describe the components that are extracted, and we shall do that here. Descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) were computed, and Authors: Roger Watson, PhD, RN, FAAN, Professor of Nursing, School of Nursing & Midwifery, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield; Ian J Deary, PhD, FRSE, FBA, Professor of Differential Psychology, Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiol- ogy, Department of Psychology, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh; David R Thompson, PhD, RN, FAAN, Professor of Cardiovascular Nursing, Department of Health Sciences/Department of Cardiovascular Sciences, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK; Gloria Li, BA, RN, Research Assistant, Nethersole School of Nursing, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China Correspondence: Roger Watson, Professor of Nursing, School of Nursing & Midwifery, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK. Telephone: +44 114 226 9624. E-mail: roger.watson@sheffield.ac.uk 1170 Ó 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Journal of Clinical Nursing, 19, 1170–1172 doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2702.2009.03159.x