The Impact of Spirituality and Stress on the Health of Emerging Adults

This study investigated relationships between perceived stress, spirituality, coping mechanisms, and employment status in college students. We hypothesized that higher levels of perceived stress would be associated with increased hours of employment and reliance on negative coping mechanisms. Additionally, we hypothesized that spirituality would have a positive relationship with life satisfaction and positive coping mechanisms. We predicted that participants with high spirituality scores would practice positive coping mechanisms more often than their less-spiritual counterparts. To examine this, we surveyed ninety undergraduates attending Seattle University: a private, religiously-affiliated university in the Pacific Northwest. The difference in employment levels did not reveal any differences in coping (F (3, 80) = 0.112, p = 0.953). Our study also found a significantly positive relationship between perceived stress and negative coping mechanisms (r= 0.67,