CHAPTER TWO

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

2.1. INTRODUCTION

People all over the world experience one form of stress or the other irrespective of their race, color and ethnicity, professional or academic background. Anspaugh, Hamrick, and Rosato (2003) shared the view that stress came in several forms and affected people of all ages and walks of life. This implies that stress is a part of life and has many causes to it and that the degree of stress in our lives is greatly dependent on factors, such as the physical health of the individual, the quality of our interpersonal relationships, the number of commitments and responsibilities we shoulder, the degree of others’ dependence on and expectations of us, the amount of support we receive from others and the number of changes of traumatic events we go through in our lives. This means that life itself is stress related depending on the individual’s lifestyle and the level of cultural development.

2.2. CONCEPTUAL CLARIFICATION CONCEPT OF STRESS

Researchers (Vermunt and Steensman, 2005; Topper, 2007; Ussery, 2007; Malach-Pines and Keinan, 2007) have defined stress as the perception of discrepancy between environmental demands (stressors) and individual capacities to fulfil these demands. While researcher (Campbell, 2006) defines stress as the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other types of demands placed on them. Stress occurs when an individual is confronted by a situation that they perceive as overwhelming and cannot cope up with. Academic stress among students have long been researched on, and researchers have identified stressors as too many assignments, competition with other students, failures, lack of pocket money (Fair brother and Warn, 2003), poor relationships with other students or lecturers, family or problems at home. Institutional (university) level stressors are overcrowded lecture halls, (Ongori, 2007; Awino and Agolla, 2008), semester system, and inadequate resources to perform academic work. Erkutlu and Chafra (2006) for instance opines that, when these events take place, an individual becomes disorganized, disoriented and therefore less able to cope up, thus resulting in stress related health problems. The pressure to perform well in the examination or test and time allocated makes academic environment very stressful (Erkutlu and Chafra, 2006; Polychronopoulou and Divaris, 2005; Misra and McKean, 2000).

This is likely to affect the social relations both within the University and outside (Fair brother and Warn, 2004) since there is conflict with the social aspect of one life. This not the only affect the social relations within or outside the University, but this goes to affect the individual person’s life in terms of commitment to achieving the goals. Knowing the causes of students stress will make the University administrator know how to monitor and control the stress factors that are responsible for the students stress. scholars (Ornelas and Kleiner, 2003; Jaramillo et al., 2004; Verment and Steesma, 2005; Ongori, 2007; Topper, 2007; Ongori and Agolla, 2008; Agolla, 2009) for instance identified the symptoms and the causes of stress in work environments as sitting for a long period of time, poor work performance, poor interpersonal relationship, inadequate or lack of resources, inadequate time to perform particular assignments, poor working conditions, overcrowded work stations, excessive paperwork, and many others. Whereas these factors have been found to be responsible for stress, it is worth noting that in order to minimise the stress among students, the University administrators must develop appropriate strategies that will enable them to detect in advance the symptoms and causes of the stress.

Researchers (Malach-Pines and Keinan, 2007; Ongori, 2007; Ongori and Agolla, 2008; Agolla, 2009) have long identified stress symptoms as lack of energy, taking over the counter medication, high blood pressure, feeling depresssed, increase in appetite, trouble concentrating, restlessness, tensions and anxiety among others. An individual experiencing one of these factors is likely to be a victim of stress. Although this may also depend on how the individual appraises the situation, and how resilient is the person. While the negative eects of stress on an individual may vary considerably from one student based on their previous encounter with situations and the resilient of the individual student. In their findings (Jaramillo et al., 2005; Stevenson and Harper, 2006) point out that, the perception of the individual determines whether or not the stressor has a detrimental eect; that is whether it causes physical or psychological symptoms of stress in the individual. Earlier study by Siegrist (1998) also indicated a close link between high amounts of occupational stress and ill heath. This means that deterioration in health of the individual is likely to affect the individual performance. In a higher learning institution such as University (Smith et al., 2000) where the demand placed on students is based on deadlines and pressure for excelling in tests or examination, students are likely to be the victims of stress. Our argument is that, students stress has not gained much attention since most scholars were preoccupied with the conventional work related stress as opposed to academic students stress.

Institutions world wide have not taken serious steps to find out the health of students, this could be attributed to the fact that students who stay at the university is based on short period, and therefore their stress have little direct impact on the activities or operations of the institution. Another reason why little have been done on students stress could be due to the fact that students’ presence in the institution have no direct relationship to the quality of education they get. We argue that, unless the university puts appropriate measures that take care of well being of the students, the student’s health may compromise the quality of education they are supposed to get (Daniels and Harris, 2000; Smith et al., 2000; Finlayson, 2003). Gibbons and Gibbons (2007) and McCarty et al. (2007) have carried out extensive research on stress and found out that, stress is associated with how an individual appraises situations and the coping strategies adopted. The motivation for this research is that, there have been reported cases of stress among students that has resulted in loss of lives. The causes for such actions are not known since the victims of stress are never present to tell their stories. Although the counselling centre within the University do keep records of students who seek help.