Perceived Stress Factors Essay Example

perceived stress of the college students had a significant impact on their academic performance.

About 40% of the students perceived that not getting enough sleep primarily contributed to their lower grade point average followed by having problems with roommates and social activities tied for second with 26%. Lastly, working part-time job came third with 23%, close to the number 2 spot. Cebu Normal University (CNU), being an institution flagged for teacher education, has been known to be effective in providing rigorous quality training. Considering this stereotype, college students are confronted with so many obstacles to overcome in order to achieve their optimal academic performance.

It takes a lot more than just studying to achieve a successful college career. Different stressors can pose their own threat to a student’s academic performance. The way their academic performance is measured is through the ordinal scale of grade point average (GPA). Going into the scope of CNU, the stressors in any way were able to influence the academic performance of the students. Evidently, CNU students complain discretely about particular matters in this university. CNU makes use of a block-sectioning set-up where students have no other options but to follow the prearranged schedule.

Aggravating to the situation is the inconsistent study loads which most often than not exceeds to the prescribed load in a semester (CNU Revised Curriculum 2001-2002 until 2004). This makes proper time management difficult to do in day’s work. Consequently students cannot choose their own professors due to time constraints and unavailability of rooms/space for the students (Hernani, 2007), which add up burden whenever a stern teacher imposes projects in an inconsiderable time. Thus, students need to burn the midnight

candle in order to comply with the demands of the teachers.

This makes CNU students sleep shorter than the normal number of hours. This backdrop paves way in developing psychological maladjustment such as anxiety and stress, which is contributory to lower academic performance as supported by Kelly and Clanton (2001). Some academic situational constraints as referred by Hatcher and Prus (1991) add more to the stressful scenario in CNU. Factors like job responsibilities (being a student assistant, student librarian, tutor, and other part-time employment in out-of the-campus premises to a name a few) might divide focus for academic studies.

The more time spent at work, the less time a student spends in studying. Having to hold down a job and still be in college is a constant source of stress (Calderon et. al, 2001). At some point students are involved in many organizations like dance clubs, chorale groups, athletics, and other extra-curricular activities, which in turn abate their time devoted for study. Along with this, students are into personal relationships like having a boyfriend, girlfriend or peers. These demand valuable time intended for study.

These academic situational constraints are easily managed only if students have the freedom to choose their own schedule. Regarding the facilities of the school, there is an obvious predicament on its setting which is influential to student’s lower grades. The library in itself as considered the research center of the students, is not that conducive for intellectual pursuits. Its ventilation, accessibility of books, and space, discourage the students to make use of the library. In fact, the library is fully loaded during lunch time up to 1:30 PM.

The library needs professional staffs and librarians

but request were not approved by the CNU Department of Budget. (Ruben, 2007). In the classroom, students complain about the “oven-like” environment plus the distractions due to noise from vehicles since the campus is situated within rush traffic boundaries. Adding more to the stressors is the sanitation and odor of the restrooms. Water supply is inadequate making the place gloomy and dirty. This implies that the aforementioned are stress contributories, which in turn affect the CNU student’s outlook towards studying.

Students who have children to care of can often find themselves being held out of classes for reasons like time adjustment since they still have to attend their filial obligations, financial obligations and personal adjustment to academic and family pressure (Hernani, 2007). These overlap priorities supposedly centered for study. Today, more and more students are deciding to return to CNU after being out in the work force. Coming back to the university puts high demands on older students who have family already. These factors of having a family could itself contribute to lower GPA as corroborated by Herman, Grisby, and Woods (1998).

As a state university, the government subsidizes tuition fees. Many poor but deserving students from far away provinces avail the affordable but quality training it offers. Most often, they decide to leave their family and live on their own to be nearer to the university. This makes the CNU students find difficulty in the household chores like washing their uniform, preparing their meals, ironing their clothes, etc. , on their own. Living in boarding houses might give rise to problems with roommates and landlords especially if the finances won't fit for a time’s need.

While others

live in this way, some CNU students prefer to travel by bus even for miles back and forth in the university so as not to be away from their beloved family. The hustles in standing in the fully loaded bus for long hours can develop stress. Truly, financial, emotional, and social supports are tremendous factors in the success of a college student (Trockel, et. al, 2000). As reflected in the registrar’s records, there had been an average of 11% abated on the CNU BSEd third year students per semester who enrolled for the past three years way back on the A. Y. 2004-2005.

Looking forward, graduation rates dropped 6% for the last three years (Albarico, 2007). The third year level is one of the most, if not the most crucial year in a student’s life. It is the transition stage and the difficult situation getting almost into the final completion year of studies. Sometimes, there are instances where students are tempted not to finish because of struggles that they cannot handle the problems nor think of alternatives and give up. This tells us that an inciting problem might have influenced these students included in the count to discontinue pursuing the degree.

At any rate, stressors have impact to the decline of student’s academic performance. A student who has a high score on the perceived stress scale has experienced high level of stress, and his or her GPA at that time should show that negative effect (Cohen and Memerstein, 1993). All of the factors that have been mentioned can contribute to a college student’s level of stress. By themselves these constraints may have no effect at all on

a student, but when combined, a student could perceive them as stressful, and the stress factors could have a dramatic effect on a student’s academic performance.

With too many stress factors present and with limited resources of time and energy, a student could easily be overwhelmed. What one student perceives as stressful may not be a factor of stress at all for another student. From the above premise, the researchers found interest in determining the various stressors confronting the students with end view of helping minimize these many concerns of the students brought about by stressors which at any rate have impact on their academic performance.

This study will not only give focus on the present environmental stress the students perceived, but also on the key areas of emotional, personality, cognitive, socio-cultural, physical, and coping factors as a whole. Hoping that through the findings of this study, the researchers could formulate significant possible solutions to manage stress that would be beneficial to the student’s academic success.

This study is anchored on the book of Simons, Santrock, and Kalichman (1994) about stress entitled Human Adjustments. In their voluminous book, they defined stress as the response of individuals to circumstances called stressors. Stress, says they, is one of the images of human adjustments, a major contributor to the success or the failure of a human endeavor. They further commented that stress is the sign of the times. We live in a world that includes many stressful circumstances. People in general feel “stressed-out” in their work places, their communities and even on their home environments. Because of this, almost everyone has adopted some personal strategy in order to withstand stress.

Today, more and

more people are jogging, going to health clubs, and following diets designed to reduce tension. For some corporations, they develop elaborate stress management programs to cope up stress due to work overload. Unfortunately, not all can resist to the threatening outside forces. In turn, this enables one to loose their resiliency amidst the great pressure. The response of individuals to circumstance and events called stressors threaten our adjustment abilities. Evidently, there are too many stressed-out people in this world.

For those people who cannot cope up with stress Simons et. al. (1994) provided a cross-sectional view on the nature of stress. As they further discussed, there are a number of important facets of stress: the physical factors, emotional factors, personality factors, cognitive factors, environmental factors, socio-cultural factors and coping strategies. These are the key areas perceived by a person who can influence the behavior and performance of the individual. As they religiously defined, the physical factor is the role played by the body in stress.

It includes the innate and outward appearances from the body making the biological make-up uncontrollable yet manipulable by stressors. This covers health, physical appearance, diet, body changes, body odor, sleep habits, and aging. Health problems are situations or conditions for people and their environment measured in death, disease, disability, or risk that is believed to persist in the future and is considered undesirable. Many people have discounted the role of health in their lives.

Before they know it, the individual moves into the exhaustion tage. In this case, the wear and tear on the body takes its toll -- the person may collapse in a state of exhaustion and vulnerability to disease increases

(Selye, 1983). On the other hand, the role of physical appearance has been magnified to its fullest. Variations in the physical features are believed by anthropologists to be an important factor in the development of personality and social relations in particular, physical attractiveness. This in turn gives rise to make one do a routine diet, be conscious of their body changes, odor, and aging.

Furthermore, a strong yet neglected by people to an extent is sleep. Being a physical factor, short sleepers tend to have lower performance rating than those of long sleepers simply because short sleepers have less ability to focus on their work due to their lack of sleep (Kelly et. al. , 2001). For many years, psychologists debate how critical it is to determine the emotional state of the person. In their view, an emotion is considered to be a feeling or effect that involves a mixture of physiological arousal (fast heartbeat, sweating palms, stomach churns etc. , conscious experience (thinking about being in love with someone, hating ones enemies, indifferences etc. ), an overt behavior (a smile, grimace or tear etc. ). In their book, they cited Plutchik’s theory on the wheel of emotions). Plutchik (1991) postulated that emotions are like colors. Every color of the spectrum can be produced by mixing the primary colors. Possibly some emotions are primary and if mixed, form all other emotions. Combining sadness and surprise yields disappointment while jealousy is composed of love and anger.

Due to this, Plutchik developed the emotion wheel which demonstrates how he believes primary emotions work. Mixtures of primary emotions adjacent to each other produce other emotions. Plutchik, like most psychologists, believes

that emotions are experienced as positive or negative. In relevance to students stress, the researchers only focused on the negative emotion which is perceived to be influential to an individual’s performance. This includes grief, anger, fear, love conflict, sadness, and disappointments.

Moving over, there are some personalities that help us cope more effectively with stress. While this holds true, there are certain personality characteristics that make us more vulnerable to it. These are the personality factors proposed by Friedman and Roseman (1974) as Simon cited in his book. These personality factors are portrayed by behavior patterns known as clusters of characteristics, which include excessive competitiveness, hardiness, impatience, hostility, sensitivity, self-control, self-esteem, and confidence.

Simon elaborated further stress as he cited Lazarus(1984) cognitive factors on stress, While there are some common ways we all experience stress, he said, not everyone perceives the same events as stressful. To some degree, then, what is stressful depends on how people cognitively appraise and interpret events. Further, Lazarus coined the term Cognitive Appraisal, which is used to describe individual’s interpretation of events in their lives. This includes factors like perceptions of harm, threat, challenge, determination, hopelessness, calmness, and assertiveness.

Consequently, many circumstances, large and small, can produce stress in our lives. There are cataclysmic events brought about by the environment, which leads us to compromise on stressful situations. Sometimes stimuli become so intense that we can no longer cope with them. These environmental constraints as Simons et. al, (1994) cited, enables us to develop a stressful feeling, which prevalently affects performance. This includes frustrations due to unhappy relationships, living in poverty, overload of work or job responsibilities, burn out, conflicts, life events, daily

hustles, expectations, work atmosphere, and home setting.

Socio-cultural factors, he further explained, influence the stressors. Individuals are likely to encounter (whether events are perceived as stressful or not) and the expectations individuals have about how stressors should be confronted. Among the socio-cultural factors that influence stress are acculturation, socio-economic status, gender, adaptation, assimilation, separation, marginalization, and segregation. Along with all these, he further constituted, not everyone responds the same way to stress. Some individuals throw in the towel and give up when the slightest thing goes wrong in life.

Others are motivated to work hard to seek solutions to personal problems and successfully adjust to extremely taxing circumstances. Coping is an extremely important part of adjustment. It is the process of managing taxing circumstances, expending effort to solve personal and interpersonal problems and seeking to master, minimize, reduce or tolerate stress and conflict. Thus, a stressful event can be rendered considerably less stressful if a person successfully copes with it. He cited three coping strategies indicated by Lazarus (1993) - Cognitive appraisal, Problem-focused coping, and Emotion-focused coping.

As Simon cited, Lazarus defines cognitive appraisal as the interpreting of events as harmful, threatening or challenging, and determining whether one has the resources to effectively cope with the event. With this, there are two general types of coping efforts. The Problem-focused coping as coined by Lazarus is the cognitive strategy of squarely facing one’s trouble and trying to solve them. On the other hand, Emotion-focused coping is the response to stress an emotional manner. In line with this, there are a number of effective coping strategies elucidated by Lazarus.

These are developing self-efficacy, thinking positively and optimistically, increasing self-control, seeking social

support, engaging in enjoyable activities using humor, and engaging in stress management program. Review of Related Studies and Literature The study of stress began with Canon, who in 1925 was experimenting in the laboratory by exposing animals to cold, oxygen deprivation, and blood loss. He was exploring what he termed as the “fight-flight reaction”. According to Dr. Hans Selye, who developed the modern concept of stress, “complete freedom from stress is death”.

Selye labeled all responses to that wear and tear a stress (Douglas, 1996). Siwansburg (1993) further explains that confrontations, disagreements, and anger are influences of stress and conflict. Stress is the body’s response whenever it is threatened. It is caused by the perception of threat, not directly by the threatening or event. Stress causes anxiety and anxiety narrows perception. When stress is low, we are usually aware of our thoughts, surrounding, and what we are doing or planning to do (Grainger, AIN, 1991). Stress is synonymous with change.

Anything that causes a change in a person’s life causes stress. It does not matter if it is a ‘good change or a bad’ change, they are both stresses. When you get promoted and ready to assume your new function, that is stress. Good or bad, it is a change in your life and it is stress as far as your body is concerned (Burns, 1997). According to Taylor (1990), stressors or systems input can either be maturational or something that must be dealt with after it happens. An adolescent is expected to experience physiological, emotional, and social stressors which are examples of maturational stressor.

Homes and Rahe developed an instrument entitled ‘’ The Schedule of Recent Experiences”.

This questionnaire asked if an individual has had changes as death of a spouse, a divorce, marriage, retirement from work, or detention in jail. It had been found out that some of these events are much stressful than others, for example, the death of a spouse is considered the most stressful event across a number of countries such as Japan and the United States (Patrick, 1991). Adjustment to change is stressful. Many events in life produce individual stress reactions.

There are many sources of stress at work. Work adjustments such as changing job responsibilities, changes in working hour or conditions and problems with superiors are stressful. The differences between demands that people placed on themselves or perceived as available to meet the demands is a threat or stress and this would result to physiological and emotional manifestations (Tomey, 1992). Smeltzer, Suzanne, and Bore (1990) explained that stress is a state produced by a change in the environment that is perceived as challenging, threatening or damaging to the person’s dynamic equilibrium.

Long, Philipps and Cassmeyer (1994) defined stress as an integrated body response, including intellectual, behavioral, emotional and physiologic components, to a stimuli that is perceived on a conscious or unconscious level as noxious or threatening the response serves as a protective mechanism. It is elicited to allow the individual to adopt or adjust to noxious or threatening stimuli and is graded. The response varies depending on the type, strength, and duration of the stimuli and is modified by characteristics of the person.

The relationship between a healthy lifestyle and college students’ grade point average was investigated. Participants were male and female undergraduate students from Loyola University New Orleans

between the ages of 18 and 22. Participants were recruited through a sign up sheet located on the Loyola University research board. Healthy lifestyle was determined by five factors including smoking, alcohol, sleep, exercise, and diet habits. It was hypothesized that health would be related to GPA with a positive correlation between healthy diet, exercise, and sleep habits.

The results indicated that students who had a healthy lifestyle did not show a significant increase in GPA. Findings did indicate however, that a higher GPA was associated with less consumption of fast food. These findings are inconsistent with other studies that have found sleep to be related to GPA, but are consistent with other studies that have not found any relationship between health and GPA. Kelly, Kelly and Clanton (2001) found GPA to be related to the length of sleep undergraduate students receive on average each night in their study of 148 participants.

The results showed that those students who were categorized as long sleepers or those who slept nine or more hours each night reported higher GPA’s. Average sleepers were categorized as those individuals who slept 7-8 hours and long sleepers were those who slept more than 9 hours out of every 24. It was believed that the GPAs of those short sleepers were lower than those of the long sleepers because short sleepers had less ability to focus on academics do to their lack of sleep (Kelly et al. , 2001).

Significant results found by Trockel, Barnes, and Egget (2000) indicated that grade point average among first year college students was related to the sleep habits of those individuals. Diet, like exercise, affects the body’s ability to

perform. Green ; Rogers (1998) found that participants’ scores on Central Executive and Phonological Loop tasks, which measures cognitive processing efficiency, were lower for dieters than they were for those participants not restricting their caloric intake.

In addition, on multiple tasks measuring cognitive ability, Morris and Sarll (2001) found that low blood sugar levels, which occur when the body does not receive adequate sustenance, decrease cognitive ability. Blom-Hoffman and DuPaul (2003) discuss the importance of nutrition among children, concluding that dietary practices are directly related to learning capacity. Blom-Hoffman ; DuPaul (2003) determined that negative dietary habits established in childhood are carried into adulthood where they continue to plague the individual.

As the ability to learn as children is related to diet, it can only be assumed that the same rules apply as young college students continue their education. There are also a number of health–related factors that can contribute to a student’s academic performance, and therefore have an effect on his or her GPA. The amount of exercise, nutritional routines, and also the amount of social support the student perceives all can contribute to how a student academically performs (Hammer et al, 1998).

Exercising too much or not at all can influence academic performance and taking time out of frequent study hours to work out pulls away from grades. A frequent occurrence on college campuses is students becoming almost addicted to exercise, turning a healthy behavior into one that is psychologically unhealthy. In a study in 2000 Trockel, Barnes, and Egget found “That students who exercised seven or more hours a week obtained significantly lower grades than students who exercised six or fewer hours weekly or not

at all” (p. 26). Nutrition is also a problem with college students. Students may have difficulty finding the time to cook adequate meals. Most students are just learning to live on their own, and learning to cook can prove to be a challenge. Finding time to go to the grocery store once every couple of weeks can be a demanding task. Little storage space is available in the average dorm room, and food storage may not be possible at all (Trockel et al, 2000).