|
The Effect of Major Life Stressors and
Minor Daily Hassles
on the Physical and Emotional Health of Teenagers.
Whether in the form of major life changes (e.g., a death in the family) or small
daily hassles, (e.g., being late for class), we all face stress in our lives.
Teenagers, in particular, as part of their development from adolescence to
adulthood, face an enormous amount of stress. By researching and correlating
the effects of stress on mental and physical health, it may be possible to
determine the extent to which certain events, both major stressors and minor
hassles, impact a teenager’s life.
The effects of stress can be measured in several areas, two of
which are: 1) physical health and 2) emotional health. In terms of physical
health, it has been found that stress is negatively correlated with physical
health (Johnson, as cited in Garton and Pratt, 1995). A particular study,
performed at Gettysburg College, supported the hypothesis that, “high levels of
dependency coupled with high levels of interpersonal stress place an individual
at substantially increased risk for personal illness,” (Bornstein, 1995, p.
221).
Previous
experiments have primarily gathered information from adult subjects. For
example, DeLongis, Lazarus, and Folkman (1988) examined the impact of daily
stress on health and mood on a random sample of 75 married couples. The study’s
questionnaire focused on the daily stresses a married person would face. As
predicted, they found that daily stressors were positively correlated with
physical illness. Furthermore, Garton and Pratt’s (1995) study, (which focused
on the relationship between stress and self-concept in ten to fifteen year old
school students) found a “small negative relationship between overall
self-concept and the frequency of stressful events, suggesting that as stress
increases there is a decrease in self-concept.” (p. 22).
Our study
will simply increase the knowledge base with respect to the relationship between
stress and health by studying the teenaged population at Rowland Hall St. Marks
School. We will be defining stress as “the process by which we appraise and
cope with environmental threats and challenges” (Myers, 2004). Our study will
focus on daily hassles, as well as major life stressors, in teenagers at the
school.
Daily hassles
will be measured using a variation of Garton & Pratt’s “The Hassles and Uplifts
Scale”(1995), and major life stressors will be measured by Renner and Macking’s
“College Life Stress Inventory” (1998). We will use both questionnaires in
order to correlate major and minor stressors with emotional and physical health
in teenagers. Based on past research, we hypothesize that minor stressors will
correlate more strongly with physical health than with emotional health. We
also hypothesize that major stressors will correlate more strongly with emotional
health than with physical health.
|