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?
