Conducting Research Literature Reviews: A Study On Stress Factors Among College Students (essay).

Describe about the Conducting Research Literature Reviews?

College life is one of the most memorable experiences in juvenile’s life. It is in college where every teen ager enjoys the exciting environment and the engagement with their friends in fullest, the various academic structure and co-curricular activities enriches student’s life and prepare them for future. Looking from closure viewpoint the student’s life faces a major number of challenges in their day-to-day life. They are taking considerable amount of stress, which imposes successful and constantly changing strategy to deal with their stress. These stresses include a constant pressure from the environment to flourish and succeed, to overcome the economical limitations, worries about future and many more (Hout, et al, 2013). All these factors can lead to anxiety, depression or other mental illness among college students. The issue of stress factors among college and university student has been rising for several years. 

For performing the research adequately, the learner will collect the data through various means. The data will be collected by means of qualitative and quantitative method. There are various ways of collecting the qualitative and quantitative data. Quantitative data can be gathered by various means. It can be gathered by collecting primary data. There are various ways for gathering primary data. Primary data can be collected through questionnaire processes, taking interviews etc. For performing the interview adequately, some basic elements will be required and they are described below. For an interview to be performed, some participants are required. After questionnaire procedure, the data will be collected and sampling of data will be performed efficiently. Then, the validity and reliability of the data will be checked. There should be a perfect control to the variables, which will be considered in the data. After collecting data and checking validity of the data, analysis of the data will be carried out by statistical analysis technique for the data and statistical significance of the data will be carried out through appropriate process.

The main aim of this research is to investigate the level of stress that would lead to over depression, gloominess and nervousness among college students. The primary focus of this research is to eliminate the over stress from student’s life and to allow them to enjoy their teenage in fullest (Rasouli,2012). Students will be interviewed to primarily design the requirement structure that will help to minimize stress from student’s life. The necessary information for the research will be gathered by constant observation and also from responses of students in their daily task. The result of the research might point towards the progression to minimize the stress factors to help student. The outcome of the research should be noted down to compare the traditional methods for reducing stress with the adopted methods.

For completion of any research report, there should be some objectives of that research. Here also in this project, there are some objectives regarding the stress factors among the college students and they are as follows-

To observe the rate of the stress-affected students in a college

Aim of the Research

To find out the possible reasons of the stress among the students

To find out the possible way out to reduce the stress among the students

According to Hamari (2014) Stress is an observable fact that formed due to one’s cognitive assessment of the stimulation and it results from individual’s interaction with the environment. The occurrence of the stress depends on the presence of some factors that are called stressor. Stressor can be expressed as something that challenge someone’s adaptability or that can stimulate someone’s mental stability. Stress can be occurred by some factors such as social, biological, psychological factors. Stress can produce different effects such as positive and negative and this depends on the strength and determination of the stress. According to Fink (2013) stress is a physical or mental condition that is happened due to emotional distress and pains to an individual.

Teenagers mostly think about their physical factors rather than another factors. The students are often not satisfied with their traits of body structure and mostly women become upset easily than men due to their structure of the body. The another reason of stress is degradation in own self and depression occurs. Some physiological symptoms like headache may be the signals of mental overload (Hinckley et al. 2013). Other symptoms may arise like fatigue, depression that may result in change in habit of sleeping or a rapid gain or loss in weight of the body.

Families with constant conflicts that can be characterize by lack of communication or miscommunication between parents and children may cause mental anxiety among student life. The constant pressure from parents for student’s academic career will only result in increased psychological stress on their children.

The major consistent source of stress of student is academic centres. High load of homework, dissatisfactory result, high pressure of preparation for exams or the punishment may result in over stress. Parents are more concern about their child’s educational career and better performance in their school that creates extra pressure over students. According to Racine et al. (2012) education is detection of an appropriate life, however parents and teachers are more concern about the academic result.

Most teenagers are got involved urgently in a relationship with opposite sex. There is no exact way to interact with their peers for making friends with opposite sex. Moreover, they may suffer from insecurity when they are dating someone that, they may lose them or their parents may have negative views about their dates. These kinds of thoughts create stress among adolescents (Park et al. 2012).

With the constant progress of civilization people need to play more roles accordingly. A people have to play different role in their life to balance between personal and professional life. In professional life people may be a supervisor or boss or worker but the people required to be husband, wife or parents for the wife, husband or children. All these different character of one person provides a constant stress over them. Stress not only arises in an aggressive or complicated environment but also in monotonous environment.

Research Objectives

Research questions are measured to be helpful in understanding the topic of the research. List of research questions stresses on the region of study that helps in attainment of relevant and useful information for the research topic. The list of research questions for this particular topic is as below:

What are the stress causing factors in student’s life?

What are the after effects of over stressing among student?

How to reduce stress?

The important fact of research work is, it should be a well planned and sequential structured to help the researcher to accomplish the research work successfully. Research design is a drawing of the work involving the plan in detail with the data collection and data analysis. Researcher has chosen the descriptive design to understand the reason behind the increasing stress factors and the solution to overcome the stress.

At a critical period, college or university students are about to enter in there maturity. There about to be the leader for the next generation and they are supposed to be the elites in the society. So the student must eliminate the negative stress factors that are causing mental illness and depression. Adolescence is a crucial period in which youths face self-actualization that helps the students to proceed in life with success. Presence of stress in anyone’s life cause career exploitation and can destroy their life and relationship. However, a little stress is fair for everyone that help people to cope with tough situation in life (Taylor et al. 2013). Therefore understanding the sources and importance of stress is important to cope with the stress.

Data collection method

For a research work, there are two types of data collection method, primary data and secondary data collection. Primary data is collected through interviews, questionnaires; secondary data is collected through blogs, treatment portals etc (Bazeley and Jackson, 2013)

The function of this study is to do a research on a quantitative basis with the use of data of collected by interviewing students, which will describe the strategies to deal with stress management.

After collection of data, analysis of the data will be performed. This is one of the important steps in case of any research. Data is of two types- qualitative and quantitative data. Therefore, there are different analysis techniques for the qualitative and quantitative data.

Quantitative Data Analysis

There are various analysis techniques of quantitative data and they are as follows (Grbich, 2012). The first technique is the use of the frequency distribution by drawing histogram. In this simple type of analysis technique of data, the rate of frequency of observation of data can be obtained. Second type of data analysis technique is statistical description. In this technique, the idea of the central tendency is used. The central tendency includes the involvement of mean, median and mode. Thirdly, there is another analysis technique such as comparing the means. In this test, T-tests are utilised in to measure the significant difference in mean value of data. Next, another technique of data analysis is cross tabulation. Cross tabulation is also called Pivot Table. This is one of the most famous techniques for analysis of data. The relations between different variables can be obtained with the help of this technique. Another more technique is correlation. Correlation is used to obtain how much the two variables are related. Further, another technique is linear regression. Regression is more effective than the previous one in testing relationship among the variables. Lastly, the text analytics is another technique of analysis of the data. Here, in this technique, some people is allowed to provide answers of some questions in a survey.

Literature Review

Qualitative Data Analysis

The qualitative analysis of the data is generally based on the philosophy, which is interpretative. This type of data analysis is the procedure by which the different type of collected qualitative data is processed. There are different types of approaches in the qualitative analysis of the data and they are the inductive approach and deductive approach. The inductive approach is used in case of the inquiry design where the qualitative research is used. In this approach, a specific framework is utilised for analysing the data. The deductive approach is used during the limitation of time and resources that means when the qualitative research is the portion of the large quantitative research. In this approach, the people are asked to some questions and make some conclusions about that topic. There are some major focus points related to the analyzing the data and they are described further. There should be a content of message, an attitude of the speaker (Xia et al. 2012) Apart from these, it will be also included as another focus to observe whether the message represents a particular person or a group and whether the experience is real or hypothetical. Thus, the qualitative analysis of the data is  carried out.

The study is quantitative based, as it is single subject based study. The researcher used the observations technique to gather the data in the tally form under the detailed categories. The research comprises with total 100 students and interviewed in two sessions. First session without the pressure from college, that is before the college starts and one session after the college time. Researcher clearly differentiates the difference of their attitude and mood. When students came first at college before college starts, they are more likely to do fun and enjoy their day. But after the whole tiring day they are stress out with all assignments, home tasks, pressure of syllabus. The level of stress, stress factors and reason vary with every individual. The reason of stress among college students can be pressure of syllabus and assignments and that varying with additional increment from every educational year to year. In addition, the pressure from surroundings, financial pressure increase gradually as the time passes.

For performing the main research project adequately, a pilot research should be performed at first due to some basic ideas and knowledge. Here in this research report, for performing the pilot research, few college students are selected to do the job. The students are provided with some basic questions regarding the topic. Then the answers are collected and sorted out according to the requirement of the research. Then the analysis of the data is required after the collection of data. After analysis of the data, the result of the pilot research project becomes ready. This pilot research will be every useful to the completion of the research. The pilot research is very much useful in completion of the main research project because from the pilot research project, the assumption of the structure of the data collection, methods, and evaluation of the main research project can be made properly and reliability of the research is carried out appropriately.

Physical Factors

The research classified sources of stress in five categories that are physical, mental, school, relationship and social factor. After interviewing the students in this research, it is clear that all the identified factors hamper the basic nature of adolescent. As this research collects data directly from the students so this can be consider as a reliable source of information.

This research project followed all those ethical liability that must be followed by a researcher to communicate with students. As teenagers are sensitive enough to react on a topic or issue the researcher maintained that good manners to interact with them. Students are not injured or offended by the interviewer and satisfaction is obtained from both sides.

(Referred to the appendix.)

Stress is a condition in which brain take rest but failed to give it. Students face this problem very much as because they have lots of works according with their daily life. Students have lots of pressure not only for their study but also they have to be the top in the institution. Students face lots of pressure from their family also because parents want to see their child on the top so parents create pressure on the students. Then the students tried their best for fulfilling their parent’s needs. Parents cannot understand what their child will do that really or it will be the immense pressure for them. There are lots of newspaper reviews which show the increasing order of student suicide cases in the country. Students are exposed to commit suicide because of the pressure and stress on them. Teachers and parents have to evaluate the stress factors on them for giving the students a better life. Stresses run out through student’s daily life actions. Even there is some news of stressed student that they get addicted of drugs and finally committed suicide. Sometimes when students get stressed they stop talking with their parents, friends and that is the signs of their problems. A proper counselling is needed for those students because if it will not do then it will also kill them slowly. There also another reason of stress that is the living style of students because maximum number of students live in hostels and their maximum time spend in the college campus. Stress can damage student`s brain because brain has a specific capacity limit of taking, if there will lots of pressure it will damage. Sometimes the students can lose their thinking capability on the situations what they dealing.  Students are the future of our world so they have to be stress free or otherwise it will damage the thinking power of the students. When the students not get exact treatment for their stress they have to depend on other ones that should be good or bad. Technology is now a big part of student life because they are connected to the electronic media for their daily needs so the result could be good or bad for the students. Social medias are also responsible for the stress in student life because everyone wants to make themselves more and more advance so they can go anywhere they can go.

Family Factors

For colleges,

To identify the students’ stress, more support and care should be provided, so that they can deal with various reasons of stresses and can react accordingly. Through the use of emotional questions colleges can maintain a good observation on the physical conditions of students and give guidance to avoid different problems in their life.

To incorporate career development within students, college authority can start a flexibility type of career course of education that will concentrate on students’ future. This course must include cultural, social, and mental conditions and have to incorporate the prospectus of each department.

To design programme on stress removing strategies, educational system should prepare and provide courses that will provide benefit the college students to minimize the effect of stress from their life.

For students,

To manage emotion and establish a positive mean of life college students should give interest to the substantial and health related to mental and look at the emotions at every times to stay away from beginning of stress-influenced gloominess.

To Increase the stress managing abilities learner should take part in an dynamic role in stress management where they can learn various techniques to transform anxiety or frustration that caused by amendment of stress.

To make a family support, to release emotions of stress family can help every teenager.

To cope with stress strategies like meditation, prayer and sleep is very helpful and find to be significant to struggle with academic stress. Also practising hobbies can help a students to handle with educational stress.

Conclusion

The main findings of this study hence over and done with academic stress, that it was highly linked with social and financial stress for students. Sleep, meditation and hobbies of any individual can help them to handle stress very effectively.

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