Stress Among Undergrads in Malaysia

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SPRING 2017

PSY373 RESEARCH METHOD

Final Assessment: Research Proposal

Stress Among Undergraduates in Malaysia

Soniscya Karajj

UIU ID: 300 455 877; SCSJ0019576

UPPER IOWA UNIVERSITY

Research Title

Stress among Undergraduates in Malaysia

Introduction

Adolescence is a phase of human advancement that happens amongst youth and adulthood. Although there are various meanings to what adolescence is, this stage is seen as a phase where youngsters encounter rapid development in terms of their body and attitude towards full development. In the education system, adolescents are those receiving education in primary schools, secondary schools, vocational schools, colleges as well as universities. Due to rapid physical changes and mental improvement amid this stages, students may experience incompatibility in terms of mental development and physical changes or with the social environment leading to problems that may arise from inadequate adaptations. These issues may additionally bring about mental inconveniences and even initiate deviant behaviors. As per Campus Security Report Center, Ministry of Education in Taiwan (2009), undergraduates are reported highest cases of suicide, followed by secondary and vocational school students. Adolescence is a dangerous timeframe where youngsters encounter self-organization and role confusion. For them, stress for the most part originates from exams, interpersonal relations, relationship issues, life changes, and profession exploration. Most of the stress can be attributed to the attitudes of the students as well as rapid change in lifestyles. Apart from worrying about activities around them and their careers, students often face the fast pace of life that is the creation of modern technology. Such stress may as a rule cause mental, physical, and behavioral issues. Undergraduates are at a critical stage where they will soon enter adulthood. They are regarded as elites to the public thus they ought to improve their stress administration capacities in order to carry on with a sound life in the wake of entering the society. For university freshman, they have to not just adjust with themselves to the new life and new condition but be additionally acquainted with numerous new individuals, occasions, and things. The life stress on them is great. Therefore, understanding the root of stress among them and how they can adapt to the stress is vital. As the number of university going students in Malaysia is drastically increasing every year, this research is aimed at undergraduates in Malaysia to investigate their stress sources and how they cope with stress through a questionnaire survey.

Literature Review

According to a book titled Stress & Stress Management (2010), stress is considered good and it motivates individuals to be a much more productive person. It is believed to be an extremely normal part of life and is only assumed odd, when an individual has never experienced stress as it can be triggered from any given circumstances. It is a known fact that different people treat stress differently and how they cope with stress may differ from the next one. Stress is the body’s way of regulating itself to the changes that’s happening around it and getting used to taxing demands. Nevertheless, a strong response or even too much of stress is harmful to the mind and body. It is vital for everyone to understand the importance of stress management and what stress can do to health and happiness should there be a lack of stress management. Learning about the mind-body connection helps one in managing stress as it gives us control on our health in a positive manner. Stress is believed to arise from various sources such as environment, social stressors, physiological and the thoughts itself. There are several symptoms that the body and mind give off when stress is almost exceeding the level of tolerance as different people take different levels of stress. The three most common responses when someone is overflowing with stress are; getting angry or giving off and agitated response, depressed or withdrawn response and frozen stress response. A person can react extremely different from time to time given the type of stress being faced. While the greater part of this is continuing, something else happens that can have long haul negative impacts if left unchecked. A similar system that turned the stress reaction on can turn it off. This is known as the Relaxation Response. The unwinding reaction is a physical condition of profound rest that changes the physical and emotional reactions to stress. One approach to diminish stress is meditation. meditation that develops mindfulness can be especially viable at diminishing stress, tension, gloom, and other negative feelings. Instead of stressing over the future or choosing not to move on, mindfulness meditation switches the attention on what is occurring at the very moment. Mindfulness meditation is not equivalent to daydreaming. It requires constant effort to keep up your concentration and to take it back to the present minute when your mind meanders or you begin to float off. Be that as it may, with consistent practice, mindfulness fortifies the zones of the brain related with happiness and unwinding.

College is constantly known as an agreeable yet a to a great degree distressing period for any youth. A study led by Brougham et al. (2009) inspected the connection between sex differences, sources of stress and coping strategies. The study was aimed at developing past research done by Zuckerman and Gagne (2003) about personality and stress. The investigation of stress perception and coping strategies among undergraduates were directed in light of discovering stress level difference amongst college men and women as far as familial relationship, daily hassles, and social connections. A total of 166 undergraduates were randomly selected from a college in Southern California and mirrored a various group as far as race, living on campus, and number of hours worked every week. Respondents were required to answer a 40-item revised COPE inventory to quantify five coping responses to stress; self-help, approach, accommodation, avoidance, and self-punishment. Respondents addressed the inquiries utilizing a 5-point Likert scale. The findings are consistent with past researches in terms of college women acquiring greater stress and use emotion-focused strategies more than college going men. The findings of the study offered support for sex differences in rating of stressors and college going women reported more prominent stress for familial relationships, daily hassles, and social connections, greater overall utilization of self-help and approach to deal with stress. College women when contrasted with men revealed the utilization of self-punishment as a general coping reaction. The collection of self-revealed data is viewed as a limitation in terms of the current study. It might be that college men were more hesitant to report understanding of stress when contrasted with women. Aside from that, sample study was genuinely homogeneous as far as ethnicity, and abundance thus the findings might not be summed up to more various undergraduate populace. However, this study demonstrated that emotion-focused coping strategies for college going women and men ruled over critical thinking strategies. Past researches only proposed that undergraduates' capacity to communicate successfully and regulate emotions added to keeping up connections and reducing stress. Through this study, it is learnt that positive trade in family relationships, for example, social support and opportunities for autonomy were additionally found to build undergraduates' capacity to deal with stress.