Statistical Analysis of Stress Levels in Students

Pursuing Professional Courses

Harish H. Kenchannavar 1[0000-0001-7369-0565], Shrivatsa D. Perur 2  [0000-0002-2977-3694],

U. P. Kulkarni 3 Rajeshwari Hegde 4
1,2 Gogte
Institute of Technology, Belagavi, Karnataka, India
3 SDMCET, Dharwad, Karnataka, India, 4 BMSCE, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

(1) harishhk@git.edu, (2)perur35@gmail.com,

(3) upkulkarni@yahoo.com, (4) rajeshwari.tce@bmsce.ac.in

Abstract. In this competitive era, students are undergoing a lot of stress due to societal influ-
ence, financial status, and academic environment. This is leading to many psychological disor-
ders such as depression, anxiety and many others. One student commit suicide every hour in
India and in most of the cases, stress and pressure are the main reasons for the deadly attempt.
The high level of stress is hindering the performance of the students in the academics. It is nec-
essary to find out the stress level of the students and guide them through different techniques that
help them in reducing stress levels. There are many ways to investigate the level of stress among
the students. Techniques like psychological questionnaires, physiological measures like blood
pressure, salivary alpha amylase, vagal tone can be considered for analyzing stress in students.
Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) is one of the standard psychological questionnaire methods used to
analyze stress level of an individual. It is a measure of degree to which situations in one’s life are
appraised as stress. The scale includes a series of general queries about present level of stress
experience. The scale is free of content specific to any sub population group. The PSS is used to
categorize the subjects as less stressed, moderately stressed and highly stressed. The data through
responses from 486 engineering students was collected to investigate the stress level of the stu-
dents. The data thus obtained is validated using the statistical tool ANOVA. ANOVA test is a
way to find out if experimental results are significant. The gathered data is validated for statisti-
cally significant group and used for further analysis. The results from the analysis of PSS showed
that the female students are less stressed when compared to the male students. The result can
further be imbibed in an intelligent system which could detect the level of stress and suggest a
method or technique to the subject so as to reduce the level of stress.

Keywords: Stress analysis of professional course students. Perceived Stress Scale.

One-way ANOVA.

1 Introduction

In the world, around 94% of the people feel that they are stressed. There are diverse
reasons for this like financial status, societal status, work pressure, health issues. In
India, it is noted that around 82% of the total population is stressed. The study also
reveals that the people of the age 16-24 in India are much more stressed when compared
to other countries as shown in Fig 1.
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Fig. 1. Statistical survey of the number of people suffering from stress in India [1]

People are stressed when they face a scenario that creates them feel pressurized and
hinders them from managing it effectively [2]. Exposure to situations that stresses an
individual out usually relates to a better risk of physical and psychological impairment
[3]. It is an important stage of reference in health studies related with each individual’s
general health status and totally different sicknesses, like mental disorders, cancer, ves-
sel disease, drug misuse, chronic diseases, and so on. From fig. 1, it can be seen that
people in the age group of 16-24 years are more stressed compared to other age group.
This shows that the students who are studying in colleges are highly stressed. As per
the research study, the students are stressed due to a pre notion that the college life is
all fun and no studies. As the days pass on, students find it difficult to cope up with the
studies which leads to depression.
The stress level of students who are persuing professonal courses are more compared
to the students who are studying degree courses. This is due to continous evaluation of
their academic performance on a day to day basis, mandatory participation in extra and
co-curricular activities etc. The increased level of stress affect their academic
performance. They are also influenced by external factors such as parental pressure,
teacher’s pressure, physical environment, relationship with others and internal factors
such as psychological changes, attitudes towards others, feeling of anger, fear, worry
etc. This in turn leads to stress and finally depression which provokes thought of sui-
cidal attempts. Fig. 2 shows the causes of negative emotions leading to stress and pos-
itive emotions such as happiness, self-confidence which help the students to build re-
silience. There is a need to find a way that helps the students to control their negative
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emotions and the stress level in order to excel in their academics. There is a need to
have a stress analysis of the students of professional course to have a critical under-
standing of the cognitive behavior of the students.

Fig. 2. Causes of stress in students [2]

In explicit, the stress level analysis is critical for understanding, preventing, and
treating the students of the Professional degree course. In that respect are different cri-
teria that can be applied to analyze stress. Stress levels can be analyzed through ways
like
(i) Psychological questionnaire.: The psychological questionnaire method
is one way to analyze stress with the help of predefined questionnaire.
The questionnaire involves general queries rather than being specific to
any personal subgroup.
(ii) Physiological measures.: Another way through which stress can be
measured is the physiological parameters like blood pressure, Velan tone,
Salivary amylase. Studies have shown that there are drastic changes in the
physiological behavior of an individual when in stress.

One of the foremost wide disseminated strategies for measuring psychological stress
is the Perceived Stress Scale. This scale produces a worldwide score for stress as per-
ceived that imbibes general queries instead of concentrating on particular incidents. The
scale may well be helpful to match stress recognition in numerous countries. Using this
scale, subjects are asked to gauge the earlier month for self-analysis. The scores ob-
tained by the scale are considered to categorize the subjects as less stressed, moderately
stressed or highly stressed. [3]
PSS is a reliable tool to analyze the stress level of an individual. There are different
types of PSS available like PSS 4, PSS 10, PSS 14. The Cronbach’s alpha values ob-
served for the PSS-4 were only marginally admissible. This may be attributed to the
PSS-4 including less queries than the PSS-14 and PSS-10 since Cronbach’s alpha in-
clines to grow with the number of items in an instrument. Thus, selection of PSS 10
would be more apt when compared to PSS 4.
The test-retest reliability of the PSS was assessed in different scenarios. However,
in a few of these scenarios, the Pearson’s or Spearman’s correlation coefficient was
4

implemented in the test. There is a need for further assessment of the test-retest relia-
bility of the PSS. In regards to an interval, the PSS showed admissible test-retest relia-
bility when its initial and subsequent administrations were separated by between 2 days
and 4 weeks. Authors opined that a systematic, longitudinal study of changes in PSS
scores is required to further clarify this. [4]
The PSS-4 scale encompasses a clear supremacy in terms of the time required to
finish and simple use. This evaluation is easy to finish at a given interval of time. The
most acceptable grounds for selecting the PSS- 10 rather than the PSS-4 isn't account-
able, as several studies have shown a responsible level of PSS 4 is greater than PSS 10.
[5]

The Perceived Stress Scale is an essential factor of reference in fitness studies related
to each individual’s health situation and completely one of a kind disease, like mental
disorders, most cancers, vessel sickness, drug abuse, persistent illnesses, etc. During
the initial development of the measure, an item distinction related to statement direc-
tionality (negative vs. positive) was identified. Perceived Stress Scale will have a pre-
defined questionnaire to analyze the stress of an individual. Based on the scores ob-
tained from the response, a student’s stress level can be measured.
Hypothesis exams of the PSS continually established a satisfactory correlation with
depression or anxiety. For the recognized groups validity check of the PSS, demo-
graphic categorical variables (e.g. marital popularity, academic fame, gender, and hav-
ing children) had been used basically without prior decided expectations or evidence.
It was advocated that the known groups’ validity for organizations that have been for-
merly nicely decided to be implemented in destiny research. [6]
With respect to gender, few of the studies found that the PSS scores were signifi-
cantly higher in women than in men. The gender-related difference in PSS scores re-
mains a matter of debate. Some believed that it was an artifact of measurement bias,
given that the women are more likely to score on the negatively worded items of the
PSS, while others believed that there is a true gender difference arising from social,
biological, or psychological influences [7] [8]. Therefore, opinion was, gender should
be considered carefully when evaluating known-groups validity in the PSS.
The PSS measures general stress and turned into as a result distinctly free of content
that changed into specific to any precise population. However, the PSS have been em-
pirically confirmed with populations of specially college students or people. Further-
more, the authors endorsed a multicultural psychometric evaluation of the PSS. [9]

The paper has been organized in the following manner. Section 2 handles with the
methodology and design strategy employed in the analysis. Section 3 covers the results
and discussions followed by conclusion in section 4.
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2 Materials and method

The predefined questionnaire of the PSS was shared through Google forms to different
engineering college students across Karnataka. 486 students (N Male=273, NFemale= 213)
had responded for the questionnaire. The median age of students was MMale= MFemale =
21. The responses from the questionnaire are validated using a statistical tool called
One-way ANOVA. ANOVA test is a way to find out if experimental results are signif-
icant. [10] The gathered data is validated for statistically significant group and used for
further analysis.

2.1 One-Way ANOVA

In records, one-way analysis of variance (abbreviated one-way ANOVA) is a way that

may be used to examine means of or greater samples. This technique may be used best
for numerical reaction records, the "Y", typically one variable, and numerical or (com-
monly) express input facts, the "X", continually one variable, consequently one-way
ANOVA checks the null hypothesis, which states that samples in all businesses are
drawn from populations with the identical mean values. To do that, two estimates are
fabricated from the population variance. These estimates rely upon various assumptions

• Response variable residuals are commonly disbursed (or approximately usually dis-
bursed).
• Variances of populations are identical.
• Responses for a given institution are unbiased and identically dispensed ordinary
random variables.

2.2 PSS Analysis

Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) has a predefined questionnaire containing 10 questions
based on how an individual felt in the past month. Of these 10 questions, Question
4,5,7,8 is considered as positive questions and the response which we stick to these
enquiries will be modified in the fashion like if the response is 0 then it will be consid-
ered as 4, if it is 1, we consider it as 3, if it is 4 we consider it as 0 and if it is 2 we won’t
alter the answer. Now the summation of the response to all the 10 questions is done.
Based on the scores we get on summation, individuals are classified as less stressed
(score<13), moderately stressed (score>13 and<26) and highly stressed (Score >26).
[11][12][13]
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Algorithm for PSS

Input: Responses to the questionnaire

Output: Classification of individuals as less stressed,
moderately stressed and highly stressed
Start
Read input as responses for questions Q: {1, 2…. 10}
For each response R to {4, 5, 7, 8 ε Q} do
If response R for Rk=0 where k= {4, 5, 7, 8 ε r}
Replace Rk as 4
Else if response R for Rk=1 where k= {4, 5, 7, 8 ε r}
Replace Rk as 3
Else if response R for Rk=3 where k= {4, 5, 7, 8 ε r}
Replace Rk as 1
Else if response R for Rk=4 where k= {4, 5, 7, 8 ε r}
Replace Rk as 0
End if
End For
Sum= R1+R2+…. +R10
If (Sum<13) then
Categorize as less stressed
Else if (13<Sum<26)
Categorize as moderately stressed
Else
Categorize as highly stressed
End if
End

3 Results and Discussion

The data gathered from the responses were tested using the single factor ANOVA
method with α value of 0.5 to check if the experiment results is statistically significant
or not. The mean scores of the male students and female students were separately ana-
lyzed. As shown in Fig 3, the F value for the attributes mean score and age for male
candidates was found to be 0.50 and F critical was 4.49. The students of different engi-
neering colleges were considered for collecting the data. A predefined questionnaire
was shared among 486 engineering students for the analysis. Students of engineering
courses in India were found to be more pressurized and stressed which made them per-
form poorly in the academics. The reasons were many including the pressure from the
parents, examination patterns, financial status, societal status. To analyze this situation
further we considered our null hypothesis for the analysis to be ‘the students of the
professional courses in India are more stressed’. The p value of the analysis was ob-
served to be 0.48 which is less than the α value. Since the p value is less than α value,
 7

the null hypothesis can be accepted and this shows that the results are significant. On
the same lines, the p value for the analysis of variance of mean and age of female stu-
dents was observed to be 0.40 as shown in Fig 4., which is less than α value and thus
the results for the female students are also significant in nature.

Fig. 3. ANOVA analysis for MALE students

Fig. 4. ANOVA analysis for FEMALE students

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Fig. 5. Mean Stress score of Female students

Fig. 6. Mean Stress score of Male students

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Fig. 7. Graph of Stress level Vs Number of students

The scores were calculated for the analysis of stress of students of different Engineering
colleges and it was observed that female students of the age group 17-19 and 24-25 are
more stressed when compared to female students of the age group 20-24 who are less
stressed as depicted in Fig 5. The male students of the age group 17-20 and 22-24 are
more stressed as shown in Fig 6.
It is also observed that of 486 students of engineering course, 7.81% students are
less stressed, 63.58% students are moderately stressed and 24.27% students are highly
stressed as shown in Fig 7.
It is observed that majority of the engineering students are stressed due to some or
the other reasons. This hinders their performance in the academics. There is a need for
some steps to be taken towards helping students to reduce the level of the stress they
have. Proper counselling for students, parents and few modifications in the curriculum
in the universities are to be made so as to make sure that the students are not stressed
out.

4 Conclusion

The study aimed at analyzing the stress level of the students of professional course. The
analysis showed that majority of the professional course students are stressed for which
there are many factors responsible like financial status, societal status, tension, worries,
health issues. The stress level was analyzed using the PSS and the data gathered was
validated through a statistical tool called Single Factor ANOVA. A course on medita-
tion and yoga would help the students to reduce their stress level and handle negative
emotions. The results obtained from the study could be used as input for the intelligent
system which could help an individual to control his/her stress in real time.
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Acknowledgements

The study is conducted under the competitive research grant, TEQIP scheme funded by
Visveswaraya Technological University, Belagavi. We sincerely thank university for
supporting us in the course of work. We thank KLS Gogte Institute of Technology,
Belagavi and BMS College of Engineering, Bengaluru for supporting us to work on
this project.

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