Ouantitaive Research: Stress Among College Students

Through personal experience, we each found that students who were in college are likely to report feeling stress. We tend to find a significant difference between college students with jobs and college students without jobs. Based on prior knowledge, we know that acute stress can be related to small daily hassles, while chronic stress takes place when several environmental stressors continue to be a worry for a long period of time, like finances and schoolwork. Emotional stress, such as anxiety, is also connected to academic stress. Students who work are exposed to more occurrences of stress. For all of the reasons listed previously, we hope to see that our study will yield to our prediction, that students with jobs will report feeling more stressed than students without jobs. Within our study we will research the following questions: How does working and going to school contribute to stress among college students; Are the grades of college students who work at least 20 hours per week affected?

The affects of working while in college varies by the type of job held: full-time versus part-time. Negative effects typically occur because of hours spent at work take time away from studying, which may lead to lower grades. Working may contribute to students dropping out of college or taking a longer time to graduate. But student employment can also be a positive experience. Some students may gain experience at their job that helps push them harder in the classroom. Many students also may feel as if there is no impact on them physically or mentally by trying to balance a job and school. Within our other study, we feel as if that a student with no job excel further in academics than students who work at least 20 hours per week.

Employment and academics generally harms grades and is stressful. These effects depend on being a part-time or full-time student, how many classes the student is taking, how many hours per week they work, how many hours of sleep they are receiving, how many hours do they study a week and whether they generally take morning or evening classes. While conducting this research we will be using not only a survey and interviews to gain quantitative data for this research paper, but we will also use 10 outside references that have approached similar research information pertaining to our own. These references will help our research to give us both the positive and negative aspects of college student who work while attending school. It demonstrates that there is research in place to build upon and continue. Our research will be able to take in mind all of the conclusions of other works and expand.

Quantitative research is the systematic scientific investigation of quantitative properties and phenomena and their relationships (wikipedia). For our project we chose to use two quantitative research methods. The research methods our group used were interviews and surveys. We chose to use these methods because they are two of the most popular quantitative techniques. We also felt that these methods allow our results to be generalized to the population under study.

We surveyed 18 working college students. Each student surveyed was given 10 standardized questions to answer. We also interviewed two working college students, one male and one female. The two interviewees were also asked standardized questions.

The surveys provided our group with general information like: classification, whether they were part-time or full-time students, the amount of hours they work a week, the amount of hours of sleep they obtain a night, whether they turn in assignments on time, and etc. However, the interviews provided our group with specific information about how working college students' grades are affected from the perspective of a male and the perspective of a female.

The interviews we conducted characterize the views of male and female working college students. Some questions we asked these students were: Does school interfere with work? ; How does work and school affect your leisure time? ; As well as do you believe school and work has a negative or positive affect on your academics? The data gathered from the surveys and interviews will be displayed in a graph that will illustrate the results of our findings.

Overall, our group felt that surveys and interviews were the best approach to gather data for our quantitative research project. Based on the results of the surveys and responses of the interviews, we were able to determine how working college students' grades were affected negatively or positively.

From findings of our survey, we found that full-time employment may cause students to drop out of school, but that part-time is more encouraging to students to remain in school. Work is becoming increasingly common among students. Although employment generally harms persistence rates, the effects more so depend on hours of work and the degree to which employment removes the student from the campus community. For example, part-time employment work appears to have little negative effect on students' GPA and it some cases it may have a positive effect. Students similarly generally perceive that limited work does not have a negative effect on their academics.

Full-time work on the other hand, does appear to have a negative effect on students' academic performance. Therefore, it is a concern that full-time work among full-time college students may be cautious to find other ways of financing college so they can complete their degrees, maintain their academic performance and collect the long-term benefits of a college education.

We found that within our literature reviews that there has been much discussion weighing the facts of this matter. This demonstrates that there is research in place to build upon and continue. According to The Condition of Education, the percentage of college students aged 16-24 working while enrolled increased from 34% in 1970 to 47% in 1995 for full-time students. Data indicates that 80% of American undergraduate students who worked while attending college in 1999-2000 (King 2003).

This study investigates how does working and going to college contribute to stress among college students and are the grades of college students who work at least 20 hours per week affected? Through personal experience, we each found that students who were in college are likely to report feeling stressed. We tend to find a significant difference between college students with jobs and college students without jobs. Based on prior knowledge, we know that acute stress can be related to small daily hassles, while chronic stress takes place when several environmental stressors continue to be a worry for a long period of time, like finances and schoolwork. Emotional stress, such as anxiety, is also connected to academic stress. Students