The Study of the Relationship between Academic Stress and Leisure Needs of Junior High School Students in Taipei City

[[abstract]]The purpose of this study was to understand and investigate: (1) The characteristics on academic stress and leisure needs of junior high school students in Taipei City. (2) The differences on academic stress and leisure needs with different demographic variables. (3) The relationship between academic stress and leisure needs. Stratified random sampling and cluster sampling were adopted to collect questionnaires from the 12 districts’ public junior high schools in Taipei City (including the complete schools). 1440 questionnaires were delivered, and 1181 valid questionnaires were retrieved. Descriptive statistics analysis, t-test, one-way analysis of variance, Pearson product-moment correlation analysis, canonical correlation analysis were applied to analyze the data. The results were as follows: 1.Worrying about not getting into an ideal high school was the main concern in the academic stress. The next was the Basic Competence Test for junior high school students, which raised their academic stress. Feeling relaxed and releasing the displeasing feelings from the heart were the requests for their leisure needs. 2.There were significant differences on academic stress and leisure needs with different gender, grade, parents’ and instructors’ expectation for the academic performance, time for leisure activity, times for leisure activities and categories of leisure activity, which meant the varied academic stress and leisure needs of junior high school students in Taipei City were due to their own traits. 3.There were three canonical correlation factors reaching significant level among academic stress and leisure needs of junior high school students in Taipei City, which revealed that canonical correlation did exist between both of them.