SID: 490480588 490427169

download data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1r7_rIvZCeqsFRSvXjNWLP7xqlR2YvP2fddA8OiORzcE/export?format=csv

access to RPUB: http://rpubs.com/mike3211/488556

Executive Summary:

The aim of the survey is to analyse the relationship between stress and studying in order to consider future stress management strategies.

It is found:

IDA

Purpose/Stakeholders “Stress has become part of students’ academic life due to the various internal and external expectations placed upon their shoulders”, “Understanding the sources of stress would facilitate the development of effective counselling modules and intervention strategies by school psychologists and counsellors in order to help students alleviate stress.”(Reddy K. J, Menon K. R, Thattil A. Academic Stress and its Sources Among University Students. Biomed Pharmacol J 2018;11(1).) This survey was designed with the intention of gathering a set of data on the stress levels of university students. The survey provided a 1-10 scale for each individual to rate their current level of stress, followed by a series of questions that aimed to identify the sources of their stress and the individual factors that may be contributing to worsening their stress such as not staying on top of their work. The dataset collected from this survey aims to mostly look into social, financial and work related sources of stress and will be of high use for researchers who are wanting to look into current data on how the average uni student perceives their levels and sources of stress.

Number of questions Our survey contains 8 Questions that together asses stress levels and sources of individuals and furthermore determines whether or not they are currently university students. https://forms.gle/r2qEfaD2qbU9hnSRA

Survey Design The survey was designed to ethically assess the stress level of university students and the potential sources of stress. However there are a few possible issues present with this survey and its participants. Firstly there is some bias towards university students becoming stressed due to university work rather than other factors. This is evident through the majority of the questions aiming to gather information on their current workloads, and amount of time spent studying daily. However, this is mostly due to the fact that we believe that university work is typically the main source of stress for students and we want to gain a better understanding of the factors that contribute to the worsening of their stress caused through university. The participants that took place in this survey were all mostly close friends at university and the majority of the participants were male 18-20 year Olds. This means that our gathered dataset does not demonstrate a diverse range of results and therefore hasn’t properly tested the ‘university students’ group that we were aiming to.

Size of participants The survey link was sent via email and facebook to over 50 individuals and a total of 22 people answered the 8 questions.

survey=read.csv('~/Desktop/Data 1001/data/survey.csv')

Research Question 1 What are the are the main sources of stress for university students?
The aim of this survey was to gather data and understand how many university students suffer from stress and why. This question aims to shed light on the reasoning behind each participants stress through finding its causation. Demonstrated in the Bar graph below it is clear that with 12/22 participants selecting university work as one of their sources of stress, it is the main source of stress for university students. This is followed by financial stress and then social stress. It is fair to conclude that university work is the major cause of stress in university students.

count=table(survey$Source)

barplot(count, main="Sources of Stress of Survey Participant", 
   xlab="Sources", ylab = "Survey Participant")

When looking further into this we were also able to find that over half of the participants have mentioned that they are currently behind on work this can be seen in the bar graph below. This could be a major reason behind participants becoming stressed due to their university work becoming overwhelming.

plot(survey$behindwork, main="Are participant up to date with work ?")

Research Question 2: Is there a link between Stress and current workload?

In one of the survey question, we asked students to measure the level of stress from 1 being completely stress free, 5 to having toxic level of stress and 10 unable to cope with daily tasks. We found that the average level of stress was 6.045, median was 6.5 and the quartile ranging from 4.25 to 7.75.

boxplot(survey$Stresslvl,
main = "1 to 10 scale of stress levels indicated by University Students",
xlab = "Percieved Levels of Stress",
ylab = "",
col = "blue",
border = "black",
horizontal = TRUE,
notch = FALSE
)

summary(survey$Stresslvl)
##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
##   2.000   4.250   6.500   6.045   7.750   9.000

We measured up the level of stress against the total workload of students which is represented as the amount of assessment due in the next 4 weeks. This shows a positive correlation of 0.62 between the total workload and stress level meaning the greater the workload the more likely the subject experiences higher levels of stress.

x=survey$Stresslvl
y=survey$DueA
cor(x, y)
## [1] 0.6216408
x=survey$Stresslvl
y=survey$DueA 


plot(x, y, main = "Stress level and workload",
     xlab = "Percieved Stress Level", ylab = "Assessment due in the 4 weeks",
     pch = 19, frame = FALSE)


abline(lm(y ~ x, data = survey), col = "blue")

Research Question 3: Is there a relationship between Stress levels and weekly hours of study?

The average hours of a uni student is 3.409 with the median at 4 therefore a right skewed data.

hist(survey$Hours,
breaks=6,
xlab = 'Hours of study',
main= 'Frequency vs Hours of studying'
)

summary(survey$Hours)
##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
##   0.000   2.250   4.000   3.409   4.000   8.000

We also measured the perceived stress levels against the weekly hours of study to see if stress has a positive or a negative impact to a student’s study. In this model, there is a positive correlation of 0.53 as the equation of the regression line is y=0.6910455 + 0.4496015x. This means the level of stress does affect studying to an extent but there are other unrelated factors that can cause stress hence the correlation is not strong.

x=survey$Stresslvl
y=survey$Hours


plot(x, y, main = "Relationship between Stress levels and hours of study",
     xlab = "Percieved Stress Levels", ylab = "Hours of Study",
     pch = 19, frame = FALSE)
abline(lm(y ~ x, data = survey), col = "blue")

relation <- lm(y~x)
res=residuals(relation)

cor(y,x)
## [1] 0.5317264
summary(relation)
## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = y ~ x)
## 
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
## -3.3887 -0.8131 -0.1639  0.5861  4.1617 
## 
## Coefficients:
##             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)  
## (Intercept)   0.6910     1.0247   0.674   0.5078  
## x             0.4496     0.1601   2.808   0.0109 *
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 1.577 on 20 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.2827, Adjusted R-squared:  0.2469 
## F-statistic: 7.884 on 1 and 20 DF,  p-value: 0.01087
summary(survey$Hours)
##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
##   0.000   2.250   4.000   3.409   4.000   8.000
model = lm(y ~ x)
model$coeff
## (Intercept)           x 
##   0.6910455   0.4496015

The residual plot of the relationship between stress and hours of study are fairly randomly dispersed around the horizontal axis therefore the linear regression model is valid for this data.

plot(x,res,
main='Residual of relationship between stress and hours of study',
ylab = 'Residuals',
xlab= 'Percieved Stress Levels')

abline(0, 0)

We can conclude that stress does have an a positive influence on studying but this survey does not cover the quality of the hours or how its deterimental to mental health.

Journal and Articles:

Veibar, L. (2019). 82% of students suffer from stress and anxiety. [online] Thenationalstudent.com. Available at: http://www.thenationalstudent.com/Student/2017-08-31/82_of_students_suffer_from_stress_and_anxiety.html [Accessed 17 Apr. 2019].

Marquis, R. (2019). 5 Main Causes of Stress For College Students| College Parents of America. [online] Collegeparents.org. Available at: https://collegeparents.org/2019/01/03/5-main-causes-of-stress-for-college-students%EF%BB%BF/ [Accessed 15 Apr. 2019].

Reddy K. J, Menon K. R, Thattil A. Academic Stress and its Sources Among University Students. [Journal] Biomed Pharmacol J 2018;11(1). Available from: http://biomedpharmajournal.org/?p=19485 [Accessed 15 Apr. 2019].

Suldo SM1, Shaunessy E, Thalji A, Michalowski J, Shaffer E (2009) [Comparative Study] Sources of stress for students in high school college preparatory and general education programs: group differences and associations with adjustment. Avaliable from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20432608 [Accessed 16 Apr. 2019].

Messarra, L. (2019). Sources of stress for first year students and their perception of the university employed support services : a case study. [Thesis] Hdl.handle.net. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2381/30891 [Accessed 17 Apr. 2019].

Myers, S. B., Sweeney, A. C., Popick, V., Wesley, K., Bordfeld, A., & Fingerhut, R. (2012).[Journal] Self-care practices and perceived stress levels among psychology graduate students. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 6(1), 55-66.http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0026534 [Accessed 13 Apr. 2019].

Bhardwa, S. (2017). Finance one of the main causes of student stress. [online] Times Higher Education (THE). Available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/finance-one-main-causes-student-stress#survey-answer [Accessed 17 Apr. 2019].

It is found from the journals that majority of university students experience stress particularily Academic due to certain requirement and expectations. The workload of students is also measured to be high particularily students supporting themselves financially. It is all concluded that stress is a concern and greater strategy is required to manage this issue.