Document Type
Thesis
First Faculty Advisor
Joseph Trunzo
Second Faculty Advisor
Brian Blais
Keywords
mindfulness; disability; social support; stress; emerging adulthood
Publisher
Bryant University
Rights Management
CC 4.0 BY-NC-ND
Abstract
College students, as part of the broader population of emerging adults, are thought to be particularly vulnerable to stress compared to other age groups as they transition through adolescence into adulthood. Various internal and external factors including mindfulness, disability, and social support play an important role in students’ stress levels. The relationships among these three predictor variables and stress were analyzed in a sample of 1,049 individuals between the ages of 18-29. Responses were obtained from the dataset “Emerging Adulthood Measured at Multiple Institutions 2: The Data” (Grahe et al., 2018). The data were cleaned in Python and analyzed in SPSS using multiple regression analyses. Higher perceived levels of mindfulness and social support were significant predictors of less stress in students, while a higher perceived level of disability was a significant predictor of more stress. The combined regression model showed that mindfulness, disability, and social support accounted for a significant amount of the variance in distress. Determinants of stress are multifactorial; identification and evaluation of variables that account for a significant amount of the variance in stress within a vulnerable population can contribute to the development of effective stress management techniques.
