Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Stress Management
11 February 2017
Critical Analysis/Reflection
Family and school are two of the biggest stressors inflicted upon colleges students today.
You cannot have one without the other being influenced by it. This study was conducted to show
how one of these stressors could spill over and affect the other. Daphne E. Pederson examined
how these two stressors could influence a traditional undergraduates sleep, physical health,
mental health, and drinking habits. In her findings, she found that both men and women have a
higher spillover of stress from school than from family, but that women have a higher spillover
than men. In regards to sleep, Pederson found that men tend to lose sleep over family stressors
There are several aspects of this study that I can relate to. Firstly, I can relate that school
is a higher spillover of stress than family. When I am stressed about something, it is typically
school related. When I am stressed about school, it also seems to spillover onto my family. My
time I spend with them is negatively affected as I allow the stress to affect me and my mood
towards them. I can also relate that I lose more sleep over school stressors than with family
stressors. The study stated that if a woman is stressed over school related things, that they could
take hours from their sleep and stay up late to finish their assignments. This is something I find
myself doing quite often when I am stressed from homework, losing sleep, and therefore being
Like every study, this study performed by Pederson has its strengths and weaknesses. The
biggest strength, in my opinion, is that it covered a variety of courses and its students, not just
one course or courses that are similar in curriculum. By opening up the questionnaire to students
in seventy-three different courses allowed a bigger variety of students and their workloads to
respond. This allowed the survey to be better represented of different courses across the campus.
The biggest weakness of this survey, however, was that it only included traditional, young and
unmarried students. Although that discouraged outliers, it also did not fairly represent all of the
undergraduate students. Also, I did not feel as though the pool of students who responded to the
questionnaire to be big enough to accurately represent the results. Only about 268 students were
analyzed in the survey. This small number of students is not enough to represent all of the
Due to this weakness, I do not believe that the author has enough information to support
its thesis and its claims. Without more students responding to the questionnaire, the survey is ill
supported and not strong enough to validate the claims of Pederson. However, the information
that was provided appears to be accurate, and I can relate to what was shown in the results. Most
of the students who responded worked in addition to school, therefore having a higher level of
stress. I can relate to that as having a part time job spills over into my school, by giving me less
time to focus on school, which creates more school-related stress. School, work, and family
stressors are all woven together, you cannot have one without influencing another, which I