Academic Stress in Relation to Resilience among College Students

Abstract

Academic stress permeates the life of students and tends to impact adversely on their mental and physical health. To perform well in academics, adolescent students face an enormous amount of pressure from their families and colleges. The thing that can release the pressure and foster easily within the college environment is resilience. It is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress. The present study examined academic stress in relation to resilience among under graduate college students and to investigate the relationship between academic stress and resilience as well as gender differences if any. A total of 120 under graduate college students were selected randomly from costal region of Odisha. Student Academic Stress Scale (SASS) originally developed and standardized by Kim (1970) and adopted to Indian conditions by Rajendran & Kaliappan (1990) and Rao (2012) and Resilience Assessment Scale (RAS) developed and standardized by Kukreja (2014) were used for the collection of the data. The data were analysed using both descriptive and parametric statistics. It was found that 70.00% and 15.83% of students were having an average and high level of academic stress respectively and 72.50% and 11.67% students were having an average and high level of resilience respectively. Results indicated that a negative and significant relationship was found between academic stress and resilience among under graduate college students. Further, though the result revealed a significant difference in academic stress, but there is no significant difference was found in case of resilience with respect to gender.