Handling the Stress of Looking for a Job in Law School: The Relationship between Intrinsic Motivation, Internal Attributions, Relations with Others, and Happiness

Abbey, Antonia; Dunkel-Schetter, Christine; Brickman, Philip

doi:10.1207/s15324834basp0403_5

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Thus, they might serve either as a buffer or as a risk factor for poorer psychological outcomes (see Coyne & DeLongis, 1986;Coyne & Downey, 1991) and health (Brown, 1986;James, 1997). Because relationships with family, friends, and peers are important to law students (Abbey, Dunkel-Schetter, & Brickman, 1983), relationships might be especially important to examine in understanding individual differences in adjustment.…”

Section: Social Relationshipsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Predicts Adjustment Among Law Students? A Longitudinal Panel Study

Pritchard

McIntosh

2003

The Journal of Social Psychology

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Although at the time of this article's publication, many anecdotes and cross-sectional studies had reported that law students experience significant distress during their 1st year, few researchers had controlled for prelaw school status (e.g., M. Garrison, B. Tomko, & I. Yip, 1996; L. Guinier, M. Fine, J. Balin, A. Bartow, & D. L. Stachel, 1994), and only a single group of researchers had explored a psychosocial factor that predicted these changes. The present authors tested 3 sets of potential predictors of adjustment: sources of stress, coping strategies, and relationship factors. The present data replicated declines in students' psychological health, physical health, and attitudes toward law over the 1st year of school. That result supports the generalizability and currency of previous studies. In contrast to other researchers, the present authors found few gender differences. Less relationship happiness, less emotional support, and use of less active coping tactics at the beginning of the year predicted poorer outcomes at the end of the year. Strain from academic pressures, lack of personal time, and social isolation were correlated with poorer outcomes.

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Section: Social Relationshipsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Predicts Adjustment Among Law Students? A Longitudinal Panel Study

Pritchard

McIntosh

2003

The Journal of Social Psychology

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“…The sprinkling of published research on student stress has been concerned mainly with specialized populations, such as law (Gilbert and Holahan 1982;Shanfield and Benjamin 1985), medical (Carmel and Bernstein 1987), and science (Shirom 1986) students. There has also been some work published on specific types of student stress, such as interpersonal stress (Barnes, Potter and Fiedler 1983) and stress in seeking a job (Abbey, Dunkel-Schetter and Brickman 1983). Shirom (1986) assessed stress perceptions among 108 undergraduate science students in Israel.…”

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confidence: 99%

Sources of academic stress: the case of first year Jewish and Arab college students in Israel

Zeidner

1992

High Educ

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This study examined sociocultural and gender group differences in perceptions of major sources of academic stress in first year college students, in addition to the relationship between reported academic stress and college achievement. Data were collected via a self-administered student stress inventory given to a sample of 184 Jewish and 209 Arab college undergraduates studying in a major Israel university. They evaluated the personal stressfulness of each of 53 potential sources of academic stress along a 6-point Likert-type scale covering a wide range of potential academic stressors (academic curriculum and course requirements, course evaluation procedures, college instruction, social milieu and cultural factors on campus, college administration and bureaucracy, physical conditions and accommodations, economic factors, organismic and interpersonal factors, student expectations, daily hassles and constraints). Arab, lower-status, and female students were hypothesized and found to be more stressed than their respective Jewish, upper-class and male counterparts, respectively. Cultural group background was found to be the most salient background predictor of student stress, followed by social class and gender, with each exerting independent (noninteractive) effects. Although group differences were observed in mean ratings, there proved to be a strong correspondence in the hierarchy of perceived stressors across sociocultural and gender subgroups. As a whole, students appeared to be most stressed by pressures originating from course overload and academic evaluation procedures and least stressed by a variety of personal, familial, and social factors. Furthermore, student stress and achievement factors were found to be inversely correlated, with little evidence for the contention that stress differentially debilitates the academic performance of students as a function of gender or sociocultural group membership. The findings also lend some evidence to the cross-cultural generalizability of major stressors in academia.Stress and its psychological manifestations are inherent in human life and are a major source of concern in modern day society (Selye 1956). Environmental stress occurs when environmental stimuli or demands are perceived by an individual to tax or exceed his or her resources to handle them (Lazarus and Launier 1978). The degree of stress experienced by an individual in a given situation depends not only on the objective properties of the stressor (e.g., intensity, frequency, duration), the individual's perception and processing of the event, and one's personal coping resources and strategies in transacting with environmental stressors, but also on the specific context and period of one's life cycle in which environmental demands are experienced. Accordingly, certain events, social environments and contexts in a person's life may be perceived as more stressful than others. A case in point is the first year college experience.The first year in college poses many new challenging and potentially threatening ...

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“…Yet another group of researchers were concerned with specific kinds of stress associated with students' life, including the stress of applying to a college [Hansell, 1982] looking for a job [Abbey, Dunkel-Schetter & Brickman, 1983] and interpersonal stress [Barnes, Potter & Fiedler, 1983]. Even the counseling literature provided little guidance: a recently developed instrument which reportedly assessed students' life stress [Lustman, Sowa & O'Hara, 1984] was clinically oriented and followed the tradition of life events research in that ongoing (i.e., 'chronic') stresses [Campbell, 1983] and daily hassles [Kanner, Coyne, Schaeffer & Lazarus, 1981] were excluded from this instrument.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Students' stress

Shirom

1986

High Educ

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The major objective of the present research was to identify stresses perceived by undergraduate students to characterize their university-related life sphere. Graduate students (n=16) served as the researcher's confederates. Each confederate solicited highly frequent and important stress conditions from a group of up to ten undergraduates, (total n = 108) using the nominal group technique.Each group provided a rank order of the ten most relevant stresses. Fifteen stresses were identified as appearing in most groups. For each of the fifteen stresses, its mean rank order was calculated across the relevant groups. The highest mean rankings were given to the group of stresses classified as examination related, followed by those which had to do with meeting class assignments and by those related to the teaching process. The results were interpreted as providing strong support to the conceptualization of stress as a condition appraised by the individual to pose threat or danger to himself or herself.

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Handling the Stress of Looking for a Job in Law School: The Relationship between Intrinsic Motivation, Internal Attributions, Relations with Others, and Happiness

Cited by 9 publications

References 19 publications

What Predicts Adjustment Among Law Students? A Longitudinal Panel Study

What Predicts Adjustment Among Law Students? A Longitudinal Panel Study

Sources of academic stress: the case of first year Jewish and Arab college students in Israel

Students' stress

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