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Stress and the High School Senior: Implications for Instruction
Abstract
The research conducted by these writers reinforced what is already known about how students are affect ed by stress. On the following pages, they discuss their findings and some implications for educators.
A 39-item life-event questionnaire was administered to 1,018 adolescents, who indicated the perceived desirability of each event and whether the event had actually happened to them either during the past year or more than one year earlier. A multidimensional scaling revealed seven interpretable dimensions of stress: Family/Parents, Accident/Illness, Sexuality, Autonomy, Deviance, Relocation, and Distress. Each dimension was scored for desirability, and occurrence was summed using unit weighting. Sex, race, and grade-level differences were evaluated for each item and scale score. The scales calculated for the two different time periods revealed that stress is correlated over time only for corresponding areas. Finally, the stress scales were related to measures of health and psychological functioning through canonical and product-moment correlation analyses; distinct patterns of association were revealed. Alternative methods of scoring life events are evaluated.
The thrust of the most prominent proposals for educational reform in the 1980s has been to make the schools more efficient at servicing the needs of the dominant social order. In the meantime, a backlog of neglected social problems has developed which points up the need for schools to develop the critical faculties of their students. In fact, a wide range of telling statistics on the socioeconomic aspects of American education show that the schools themselves are severely impacted by the inequalities present in the larger society- particularly along racial lines. The need for a critical pedagogy is acute.
PIP
This study explores adolescent females' assessments of the rewards and costs of employment and parenthood, and the impact of these assessments on their plans for organizing their adult lives. 549 young women enrolled in the 11th and 12 grades at public schools in New York City completed questionnaires addressing their future work and fertility plans, characteristics of their present family life, and their assessments of how rewarding and costly the roles of employee and parent would be to them. Results suggest that daughters of homemakers and daughters of employed women differ in their assessment of each role, and take different factors into consideration when making these assessments. In evaluating work, daughters whose mothers are employed were likely to depend on their mothers' experiences for guidance. On the other hand, daughters whose mothers are homemakers have to go through a more elaborate process of deduction. They appear to assess whether their mothers are happy where they are now and then project whether another role would be more satisfying. These young women also tend to incorporate the opinion of the father more than do daughters of employed mothers. In evaluating the impact of children, the young woman's relation with her own mother is a critical factor affecting both group' assessments of the costs of children as well as the employed group's assessments of the rewards of children. Finally, the limitations of the sample should be kept in mind when discussing the results. Though the sample was large numerically, the overall response rate was low. In addition, the sample consisted of a large number of Catholic respondents.