Psychosocial stressful life events and academic achievement among high school adolescents

Abstract

The study examined the relationship between psychosocial stressful life events and the academic achievement among a sample of adolescent students. A Likert scale was used as the main instrument based on an adapted and modified Adolescent Inventory of Stressful Life Events Scale and Adolescent Coping Inventory Scale. Interviews were made to compliment questionnaire items. Two hundred and forty three (243) randomly sampled high school students, 118 males (48,6%) and 125 females (51.4%) served as subjects. They were between 17 and 20 years of age (M =18.5, SD = 0.90). Of the 8 sixth form selected schools, 4 were urban and 4 were rural. The instrument items were reviewed to ascertain reliability. For boys’ and girls’ performance, parental social support, peer influence, health risk behaviour and the effect of self, the Cronbach’s alpha’s on the study were 0.69; 0.74; 0.78; 0.86; 0.71 respectively. Factor Analysis with a factor loading of 0.5 and above, and eigen values of 1 and above were considered valid and reliable for the instrument. The authors attended to all the sampled classes explaining the purpose and procedure of the study. ANOVA tests showed that; for parental social support, (F4df =11.34: p< .05; and F3df =1.04; p >.05), with lower levels of family cohesion acting as a source of stress. For Peer Influence, (F2df=15.43; p<.05), with peer relationships serving as both stressors and stressor buffers. Effects of high stress in boys was buffered by peer relationships and for girls by cohesive family relationships. For health risk behavior, (F2df = 11.98; p<.05). The Self Effect had a weak mean negative correlation coefficient of (r = -0.2031) against academic achievement. It was concluded that psychosocial stressful life events are related to adolescent academic achievement.