Zarima Fayikova
The Research Paper
“What role does culture play in college student stress?”

Abstract Research is conducted by using 80 Penn State Abington students. 40 of those are international and the other 40 is national. Half the participants are male and half are female. The research conducted to measure the stress levels of college students and how stress affects these students based on different cultural aspects. To measure this data, survey was used. In that survey students are asked about their demographics and stress levels depending on different situations. In the end, data is analyzed.

Introduction

In this research we are looking at how culture plays a role in college students’ life and how stress comes into play with this. There are several researches that look into international students and national students. Most of these researches indicate that it depends on the sum of variables that affect someone’s stress greatly. It is also depended on the gender you are and what kind of person you carry yourself to be. Whether being in club or morning/night person for example. However does the research we conducted support such assumptions? It was hypothesized that women are more likely to be more stressful than men and that international student experience much more stressful events than of the national because of their expectations to succeed and not to disappoint. Also students who participate in club are more likely to be stressful than those of who just come for their classes and leave after.

Method

The research conducted took place in Penn State Abington. It looked at national and international students varying from different backgrounds such as European, Hispanic, American Native, Asian, Middle Eastern and etc. Half of the participants are national and the other half is international. The participants also varied from different levels of education such as freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior. Gender also came into play. There were 80 students who participated in the research, half of the participants were male and half of them were female. There were also a few other variables in the study that affects the results such as club participation, the time students partake in classes, the distance from school, and employment status.
The survey was broken down into three sections. The first section consists of demographics and yes/no questions such as gender, employment status, whether students partake in clubs, distance from school, year in school, race/ethnicity, age, gender, how well one sleeps at night, and whether citizen or not. The second section includes questions about stress levels by using the Likert scale from 0-4. The scale goes from 0 (never) to 4 (very often) . Questions asked are about what the student experienced in the last month. Some questions are reversible questions, meaning one question is related to another question but is the opposite of the first question. For example, question three asks, “ In the last month, how often have you felt confident about your ability to handle your personal problems?” and question 5 asks, “ In the last month, how often have you felt that things were going your way?”; these two question are called reversible questions because one asks something in a positive way and the other asks the same basic thing in a negative way. If the individual answers these two in a same way, the results indicate whether truly the person understands the question or not.
The third section is about events that has happened or is happening or