Measuring Stress Experienced by University Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: University students often report feeling intense stress, high anxiety, depressive feelings, low self-esteem, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse. This study presents a new questionnaire measure of student stress consisting of 30 items to investigate the symptoms of stress and potentially protective factors. Method: A total of 100 Canadian university students (mean age 20.2 years, SD=2.5, 33 males, 67 females) participated in an internet survey. They all completed our 30 item questionnaire dealing with the perceived stress of studying and exams, and with symptoms such as nightmares, depression, feelings of “being better off dead,” low self-esteem, and with potentially protective factors such as the extent of positive attitude to professors and pride in or contentment with the social status as a university student. Results: High proportions of students reported feeling, at least at times, better off dead (52%). About a half of them felt that most professors do not seem to like them (56%) and many reported nightmares about exams (53%). Lower perceived levels of student stress were associated with more positive feelings towards the professors (r=-.37) and with more pride in being a university student and the contentment with the related social status (r=-.25). The Cronbach alpha coefficient of internal consistency of our questionnaire was .87, i.e., satisfactory. Discussion: The high prevalence of nightmares about exams, feeling of “being better off dead,” or of not being liked by the professors is worrisome. Positive relations towards the professors or pride in or contentment about being a university student function as statistically significant but only weak and hence insufficient protective factors. Conclusions: More than 50% of students reported nightmares about exams, feeling of “being better off dead,” or of not being liked by the professors. Further research is needed to evaluate correlates of student stress to other protective factors than those explored in the present study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".