Before I spent decades treating stress, I spent a year trying to measure it.

In 1993 I completed my master's thesis in Counselling and Guidance at the University of Jordan, supervised by Dr. Nazih Hamdi. The study asked a practical question: if you teach adolescents a structured way to solve their problems, does their stress go down?

To answer it, I needed something that did not yet exist in Arabic — a stress measure written for Arabic-speaking adolescents rather than translated word-for-word from English. So I built one.

Where the instrument outlived the study

The stress inventory I developed breaks into three dimensions, each scored on how well it describes you, plus a single overall stress rating.

It wasn't just written and used — it went through content validation by a fifteen-judge expert panel at the University of Jordan, reliably distinguished higher- from lower-stress students in an independent sample, and held up on both internal consistency (α = .90) and a two-week retest (r = .77). That last dimension still shapes how I work: stress is not only what happens in the body, it's also what a person concludes about their own capacity to cope.

The thesis itself was never formally published, but the instrument travelled anyway. It was later included, under my name, in a widely used Arabic reference guide to psychological and educational measurement (Ahmad Abu As'ad, 2011) — and from there reached researchers and clinicians well beyond that original Amman classroom study. It was developed with adolescent girls in the early 1990s, so any use with other populations should treat that context as a starting point, not a fixed standard.

Since then, it's travelled well beyond that original classroom:

The study

I screened 322 tenth-grade girls in two Amman secondary schools and identified 63 with the highest stress scores — roughly a fifth of the total. Within each school separately, they were randomly assigned to a problem-solving training group or to a no-treatment comparison group.

The group program ran for eight one-hour sessions over five weeks, working through the problem-solving steps described by Dixon and Glover (1984): defining the problem, choosing goals, choosing strategies, carrying them out, and evaluating the result. Everyone was assessed three times — before, immediately after, and one month later.

What it found — including what it didn't

The girls who received the training were significantly better at problem solving immediately after the program. A month later, that advantage had faded.

On stress itself, the honest answer is that eight sessions were not enough. There was no significant difference in stress between the two groups, either immediately afterward or at follow-up.

But the correlations told a more interesting story. Problem-solving ability and stress symptoms moved in opposite directions, and that relationship grew steadily stronger across every assessment point — even as the group difference washed out.

The better someone got at working through problems, the fewer stress symptoms they carried.

I have thought about that pattern for thirty years. Two things came out of it that I still practise by. Skills fade without reinforcement, which is why my work is paced and followed through rather than delivered in a burst. And capability and calm are connected — helping someone become more able is often the most direct route to helping them feel less overwhelmed. It is one reason approaches like CBT, solution-focused therapy, and DBT skills work sit at the centre of what I do.

Still in use, three decades later

A 2026 review — combining Ahmad Abu As'ad's personal confirmation with a search through the Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation Library's academic databases — traced how researchers engaged with the instrument in different ways over twenty-four years. A selected list of these studies follows below.

The earliest use found was in 2000, seven years after the thesis was completed: a Mu'tah University study on resistance to temptation adapted the response scale and cited the instrument directly. It went on to appear in a 2005 Amman Arab University dissertation on university students' anger and insomnia, and in a 2003 Gaza study that independently re-tested its reliability on a different population — before its inclusion in the Jordanian reference handbook compiled by Ahmad Abu As'ad, which put it in front of a generation of Arabic-speaking students and researchers.

That handbook became its own kind of gravity: two later studies, in Algeria (2021) and Iraq (2020), reached the instrument through the handbook rather than the original thesis — a common pattern once a piece of work enters a compiled reference guide.

Other studies took a more direct route. Three separate Kuwait-based studies — on mothers of children with special needs, and on police officers — cite the original source by name, each independently retesting reliability on its own sample and finding it held.

The most substantial use wasn't of the instrument at all. In 2003, a doctoral dissertation by Ibrahim Bajes Al-Ma'ali — supervised, like the original thesis, by Dr. Nazih Hamdi — built an entire counseling program for mothers of children with special needs on the same problem-solving framework, originally designed for adolescent girls a decade earlier, extending it to a new population and comparing results directly.

None of this was tracked or anticipated at the time.

The instrument was built to answer one question, for one study, in one year — what has happened with it since is, in its own way, the clearest evidence of its value.

Selected studies

• Al-Tarawneh, S. — Mu'tah University, Jordan (2000)
• Musleh, A. — Islamic University of Gaza, Palestine (2003)
• Bajes Al-Ma'ali, I. — Amman Arab University, Jordan (2003)
• Abd Al-Hafez Amer — Amman Arab University, Jordan (2005)
• Al-Rushaidi, H. — Amman Arab University / Kuwait (2008)
• Abdul Shareef, B. — Amman Al-Ahliyya University, Jordan (2011)
• Al-Rashidi, L. — Amman Arab University / Kuwait (undated)
• Al-Shammari, S. — University of Samarra, Iraq (2020)
• Al-Assar, S. — Islamic University of Gaza, Palestine (2020)
• Ben Hamidouche, F. et al. — Algeria (2021)

From measuring stress to sitting with it

I said at the start that before I spent decades treating stress, I spent a year trying to measure it. Everything after 1993 was that decades part — the same question, asked with fewer instruments and far higher stakes.

I became a stress counsellor for United Nations staff in Yemen, coordinated emergency psychosocial response for UNRWA during the Syria crisis, and provided trauma therapy to refugee survivors of violence with MSF-France in Amman. In each of those roles the subject was stress — measured less formally, carried far more heavily.

The thesis asked whether a skill could reduce stress in five weeks. The answer was no, not in five weeks. What thirty years since have taught me is what it actually takes: time, reinforcement, and someone steady sitting alongside you while you build it.

Citing the instrument

You are welcome to contact me for the full instrument, the scoring key, or permission to adapt it. If stress or its research interests you, feel free to reach out on WhatsApp, or book a session.