An initial study of perceived adolescent stress in relation to grade and gender during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The Covid-19 (ECDC, 2020) Pandemic took the world by surprise in December 2019 and the subsequent disaster that struck the world and India in general was and is unthinkable. The associated uncertainty is increasingly testing psychological resilience of the masses. Since there is a severe dearth of research on this issue, it was decided that a study of perceived adolescent stress on students from high school would throw some light on how this pandemic is affecting the young population. It was hypothesized that Perceived Stress would be present in both Gender and Grades. 42 subjects participated in this study. The Perceived Stress Scale was used; this is the most widely used psychological instrument for measuring perception of stress. It is a measure of the degree to which situations in one’s life are appraised as stressful. Items were designed to tap how unpredictable, uncontrollable, and overloaded respondents find their lives. The scale also includes a number of direct queries about current levels of experienced stress. In the present study, the Scatterplot shows that the correlation i.e. the linear relationship is exactly +1. A perfect uphill (positive) linear relationship is observed. From the results it is evident that Grade and Gender are positively affected by Perceived Stress. It is also evident that a certain amount of stress is observed in these subjects during this period of COVID-19 and is supported by the WHO (2020) concern that the psychological impact of this pandemic in terms of stress amongst the adolescent population is also of grave concern. This initial study suggests that more that more than half of the participants had a significant psychological impact of stress during the COVID-19 pandemic and this is supported by the study in China (2020). Banerjee 2020 has suggested that only anecdotal discussion and case reports have been done on the Indian population. This is an initial study which attempts to indicate perceived stress is observed in the young population of India.