Factors Affecting Stress of University Undergraduates: With Reference to Selected Regional State Universities

Abstract

Students are subjected to different kinds of stresses. This study was conducted with the purpose of investigating the factors affecting to the stress of undergraduates of regional state Universities of Sri Lanka. Academic factors, intrapersonal factors, interpersonal factors, and environmental factors were considered as the independent variables and the dependent variable was considered as undergraduates’ stress. The population of this study was undergraduates who are at Rajarata University of Sri Lanka, Wayamba University of Sri Lanka and Uwa Wellassa University of Sri Lanka and out of them, 370 undergraduates were selected as sample. The study applied a stratified random sampling technique to select the respondents from the population to the sample. Then random sampling was done within each sample. For the data collection in this study was used a self-administrated close-ended questionnaire and data obtained were analysed through SPSS version 21. The Mean and Standard Deviation were used for all the variables as descriptive analysis and correlation coefficient, independent sample t-test, ANOVA and multiple regression analysis were used as inferential analysis. According to the result of correlation analysis clearly indicates that all four independent variables were significant with the dependent variable. It found that undergraduates were suffering a high level of stress and academic factors were the most stressful factors of them. Moreover, the study found that there was no significant difference between undergraduates’ stress with gender-wise, university wise, academic year wise, and religion-wise.