Page 183 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 14

Ullah Dahlen (Finland)
Comment to Ulla Dahlen is
from a small
“Stress Perception and town in Fin-
land. Her edu-
Measurement in Missionary cational back-

Populations“ ground inclu-
des an MA in
Counseling
( C o lu m bi a
International
Missionaries and cross-cultural workers undergo University, SC) and a PhD in Counselor
multiple, high degree stress. The authors of this Education and Supervision (Regent Uni-
study addressed the need for a measurement in- versity, VA). While she lived and studied
strument specific for missionary stressors that in the United States for over seven years,
would also be statistically compared with an exi- she worked and did clinical counseling
sting, psychometrically tested measure. internships at Christian Counseling Cen-
ters, at a local Church as well as a one year
The authors adapted a quantitative version of the internship at a city hospital. Currently
qualitative CHOPS Stress Inventory (O’Donnell & Ulla lives in Finland with her husband Da-
O’Donnell, 2012) to measure stress among cross- vid. There she teaches counseling courses
cultural workers. The quantitative inventory inclu- at Iso Kirja College and offers counseling
ded ten categories regularly reported by cross-cul- workshops for local churches. In additi-
tural workers as areas causing stress. A Likert-style on, Ulla and David serve part-time with a
rating scale (1 = minimal, 5 = extreme) was used Mission Organization, Fida International.
to describe experiences of stress with each cate- Ulla‘s responsibilities include member
gory. Because this new quantitative measurement care for missionaries as well as teaching,
(CHOPS) lacked psychometric testing, it was ana- training and consultation, mainly in va-
lyzed along with a validated stress measurement rious countries in Asia.
tool, Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) (Cohen, Ka-
marck & Mermelstein, 1983). To strengthen the Former contributions in our eJournal
study, the authors assessed respondent bias utili- by Ulla you can see her:
zing a Marlowe-Crone Social Desirability Scale
(Reynolds, 1982) as prior research has indicated https://emcapp.ignis.de/13/#p=72
reluctance among missionaries to share vulnera- https://emcapp.ignis.de/12/#p=50
bilities (Strand, Pinkston, Chen, & Richardson,
2015).

The researchers also addressed the limitations of
the study, one of which was the nonrepresentati-
ve nature of the sample. The study sample consi- This research suggests stress-related vulnerabi-
sted of 267 participants, of whom 93% were white, lity among younger missionaries and women.
non-Hispanic. Besides ethnicity bias, 70% of the The former reported higher susceptibility to
participants were women. As the researchers sta- stress, with significantly higher PSS total scores,
ted, further research with a more diverse sample while the latter reported higher stress levels
is needed. A random sample would better enable than their male counterparts. I second the re-
the researchers to generalize from future research, searchers’ recommendation that future research
since sampling bias is not compensated even by a on missionary stress focus on younger cross-
larger sample (Pryczak, 2005). cultural workers as well as on women.

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