A Study of College Stress and Its Measurement

The purpose of the study was to compare the academic stress of freshmen in a community college with that of freshmen in a university. An additional purpose was to determine if gender, ethnicity, or semester course load was related to perceived academic stress.\ud The sample consisted of a total of 303 university and community college freshmen from English and Psychology classes at the University of North Texas and Richland Community College during the spring semester, 1989. The instrument that was administered to these volunteer students was the Academic Stress Test, a 35-item checklist of possible academic stressors. The students were asked to check the items which were perceived by them to be stressful and had occurred during the current semester. The T-statistic was used to analyze the total mean stress score for each variable being considered. Multiple regression was used to determine if there was any possibility that the variables might have a predictive effect for academic stress.\ud It was found that for these freshmen students there was a significant difference between the perceived academic stress of community college freshmen and university freshmen. The mean academic stress score for university freshmen was higher than the mean for community college freshmen. Likewise, the perceived academic stress of females was significantly higher than that of males, and higher for those taking more semester hours than for those taking fewer semester hours. There was found to be no significant difference in the perceived academic stress of white and non-white freshmen college students