Relationships among stress, coping, and mental health in high‐achieving high school students

Abstract

This study investigates the relationships among stress, coping, and mental health in 139 students participating in an International Baccalaureate (IB) high school diploma program. Mental health was assessed using both positive indicators (life satisfaction, academic achievement, academic self-efficacy) and negative indicators (psychopathology) of adolescent social-emotional and school functioning. Findings include that students in an IB program perceive significantly more stress than a sample of 168 of their general education peers, and that specific coping styles are differentially related to mental health outcomes in this subgroup of high-achieving high school students. Furthermore, coping styles (specifically, anger and positive appraisal) moderate the influence of stress on global life satisfaction and internalizing symptoms of psychopathology. C 2008

Stress-Related Symptoms in Swedish Adolescents: A Study in Two Upper Secondary Schools

“…Our findings thus seems contradictory to US findings that individuals attending schools with higher academic demands experience more perceived stress (Kaplan et al, 2005;Suldo et al, 2008). However, there are important differences between the studies: there are cultural differences between the US and Swedish schools and the two Swedish schools are fully comparable in terms of curriculum, which is not the case in the study of American schools by Suldo et al…”

“…While there is no Swedish evidence covering this suggestion, in the USA, Suldo et al showed that students following the high achieving International Baccalaureate curriculum perceived more stress than students in the general education curriculum due to higher academic demands, but this higher perceived stress did not reduce academic performance. The absence of a reduction in performance was suggested to be due to adaptive coping strategies (Suldo, Shaunessy, & Hardesty, 2008). Kaplan et al, on the other hand, state that for students in high stress school environments in the USA an increase in academic expectations may serve to increase school-related stress and reduce academic performance (Kaplan, Liu, & Kaplan, 2005).…”

Stressors in secondary boarding school students: Association with stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms

“…The difference in findings may be attributed to the different kinds of problems faced by adolescents from normal secondary schools in comparison to boarding school students, one of which includes the increased perceptions of stress in an academically demanding curriculum (Suldo et al, 2008). Other than that, the difference in sample selection, which involved different age groups, the factor of examination year and different questionnaires used, could have also contributed to the difference in findings.…”

Perceived Stress and Psychiatric Symptoms in Swedish Upper Secondary School Students

“…Finally, when selecting the study population we opted for two schools that differed in terms of socioeconomic status, academic proficiency profile, urbanicity, and geographic location with the aim of getting a sample as representative as possible. This has been asked for in previous studies (Schraml, Perski, Grossi, & Makower, 2012;Suldo et al, 2008).…”

“…Measurements of perceived stress are reported to have higher ecological validity than physiological response parameters and self-report of psychiatric symptoms (Lavoie & Douglas, 2012). The PSS has been empirically validated in college students (Lee, 2012) and has been used in adolescents in clinical and normal populations to predict outcomes such as depression, anxiety and underachievement (Suldo, Shaunessy, & Hardesty, 2008). For comparison, we used the mean score for Swedish university students (mean age 25.4 years) from a 1996 validation study of the translation of the questionnaire into Swedish, where both males and females scored 24.4 on the PSS scale (Eskin & Parr, 1996).…”