Research Blog 4: Research Proposal

Research Proposal

Topic:

College students at today’s higher education institutions are experiencing unprecedented levels of stress. Not only are students faced with situational changes and shifts in personal responsibility when they enter college, but also worries about their ability to effectively pay back student loans and guarantee themselves a job when they enter the vicious job market. These heightened expectations have led to stressed and depressed students who rely on prescribed medications even before they enter college (Lewin 2011). Unlike America’s Golden Age when pursing a college degree would only catapult a student towards the American Dream, twenty-something’s of 2014 are all but required to earn a Bachelor’s Degree if they want a career and a successful life.

Research Question:

The overwhelming presence of stress among college students suggests an absence of a solution to this mounting problem. In his New York Times article Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshmen, Tamar Lewin suggests that, “Often people think they are the only ones having trouble” (Lewin 2011). This sentiment is echoed throughout much of the literature available on the topic of stress in students particularly in relation to financial stress. Similarly, the film Default: The Student Loan Documentary highlights the situations of several loan borrowers buried in massive amounts of debt without the resources to dig themselves out. One borrower, Matt, attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and left his undergraduate education $200,000+ dollars in debt which threatened not only his financial security but also his emotional health and relationships. However some scholars believe that financial stress is a social problem deriving from a lack of financial preparedness in high school. A study conducted by Stephen Avard found that the overwhelming majority of graduating high school seniors were unprepared to deal with the finances they would encounter in college and he suggests that financial education in high school would lessen the problem of financial stress in college students. (Avard et. al. 1). Dana Becker also supports the idea of stress as a social problem when she explains, “The stress concept often obscures injustices and inequalities by seducing us into viewing those injustices and inequalities as individual problems” (Becker 7). So far, many of the solutions to the problem of stress in students have focused on coping for the individual instead of considering the role of privatization in creating a much broader social health problem. Throughout my research I seek to answer the question: How is stress as a social problem individualized among college students?

Theoretical Framework:

The very title of Dana Becker’s book One Nation Under Stress: The Problem With Stress As An Idea provides an interesting framework for analyzing the problem of individualized student stress as it suggests that 1) stress is a problem and 2) that stress is not concrete unavoidable fact but an idea which can be perceived differently by different people. I particularly plan to utilize this framework when comparing the contrasting viewpoints of stress as individual deficit versus stress as a social problem. Author Daphne Pedersen also examines stress in students as it affects multiple aspects of everyday life which she defines as stress carry-over (Pedersen 621). This concept refers to the idea that stress in one area of an individual’s life can adversely affect other aspects of an individual’s life. As mentioned earlier, students do not often realize they are not alone in their struggle with stress which in turns leads to alternate manifestations of stress within the individual. The concept of stress carry-over will be useful in analyzing the ways in which stress manifests in the individual who does not share the difficulties of their struggle with others.

Research Plan and Additional Questions:

I will begin my research with an analysis of the ways privatization broadly affects the college experience and mental health. This progression will lend itself to a discussion of stress in college students and the different types of stress that students experience. I then plan to introduce the frame works with which I will answer my research question, and employ them in an analysis of how stress manifests itself and morphs within the individual.

            Several other questions which lend themselves to a discussion of stress in college students are: When does stress first develop in students? Does social interaction have an effect on an individual’s stress level? Which types of stress seem to have the greatest effect on an individual’s everyday life? How is stress treated as a social problem? Is stress treated as a social problem?  How is stress commodified? How do scholars suggest dealing with this increasingly prominent phenomenon?