Dependent Variables Depression Anxiety Stress Psychology Essay

Dependent Variables Depression Anxiety Stress Psychology Essay Adolescence is a crucial phase in life, during which the teenagers can succumb to conditions like depression, anxiety and stress which can increase chance of mental illnesses. The present study aims at measuring the level of depression, Anxiety and Stress of the 10th std students between the age group of 14-15 years studying in rural and urban High Schools. The sample of the study obtained using purposive sampling consisted of 60 students (30 urban and 30 rural) drawn from two schools one from the metropolitan city of Hyderabad and the other from Nagarkurnool, Mahboobnagar district. In order to carry on the research, the investigator used DAS scale (Depression, Anxiety and Stress) developed by the  University of New South Wales (Australia) 1995 . Adolescence is a transitional stage of physical and psychological human development generally occurring between puberty and legal adulthood. The period of adolescence is most closely associated with the teenage years, although its physical, psychological and cultural expressions can begin earlier and end later. In adolescence, cognitive developments result in greater self awareness of others and their thoughts and judgments, the ability to think about abstract, future possibilities, and the ability to consider multiple possibilities at once. As a result, adolescents experience a significant shift from the simple, concrete, and global self descriptions typical of young children; as children, they defined themselves with physical traits whereas as adolescents, they define themselves based on their values, thoughts and opinions. The competitive nature of present day educational system has great influence on the youngsters. Every student is faced with a high demand to surpass oneself. Fa ilure to do so may often be considered as a mark of the failure of ones existence by the youngster, whose limited life experience does not permit him/her to seek an alternative. Home and school are the centers of these problems. Most of the conflicting issues arise because of the fear of loss of friends, parents. They become entangled in the grip of insecurity. Most of the time they have this fear that if they are not able to meet expectations of their near and dear ones then he or she will lose them. The additional burden of general expectations of parents, friends, teachers etc stresses the youngster and when confronted with failure hurts their self-esteem. Adolescents thus see themselves in highly conflicting situations, as they often expect to perform their best in the academic field. They often get frustrated, anxious and stressed that suicide becomes their only escape. It is important to realize that stress affects memory and the psychological well being of students. Academic stress particularly among students has been assessed as one of the most important causal factors for adolescents depression. The term depression is difficult to define because of the ambiguity inherent in it. Depression as a medical condition in which a person feels very sad and anxious and often has physical symptoms such as being unable to seep etc Inability to do so leads to stress and this begins to wear out people and the result is most often depression. Stress is the major factor influencing depression. Depression is a state of emotional dejection. Extreme feelings of hopelessness, sadness, isolation, worry, loss of interest or pleasure, feelings of guilt or low self worth, disturbed sleep or appetite, low energy and poor concentration are the signs of depression. According to salmons (1997), depression is a state of low mood and aversion to activity that can affect a persons thoughts, behavior, feelings and physical well-being. . The depressed person has negative thoughts, low self-esteem, the feeling of the hopelessness about the future, loss of motivation, change in aptitude, sleep disturbance, an d loss of energy. Depression is closely related to anxiety, most depressed individuals have high levels of anxiety (Mac Leod,Byrne,Valentine,1996) Anxiety is a subjective state of internal discomfort. . It is a normal emotion with adaptive value, in it that acts as a warning system to alert a person to impending danger. Anxiety is a mood -state characterized by negative effects, bodily symptoms of tensions and apprehension about the future (American Psychological Association,1995).psychologists believe that a small amount of anxiety helps to arouse individuals to perform better(Yerkes and Dodson,1908). However, a large amount of anxiety might hinder performance. Anxiety is considered to be a universal phenomenon existing across cultures, although its contexts and manifestations are influenced by cultural beliefs and practices (Good Kleinman, 1985; Guarnaccia, 1997). Generally, more girls than boys develop anxiety disorders and symptoms. Adolescent girls report a greater number of worries, more separation anxiety, and higher levels of generalized anxiety (Campbell Rapee, 1994; Costello, Egger Angold, 2003; Poulton, Milne, Cra ske Menzies, 2001; Weiss Last, 2001). Anxiety is known to affect both learning and performance (McDonald, 2001), no empirical research has explored the relationship between adolescent anxiety and school type, school choice, or mode of instruction. In India ,the main documented cause of anxiety among adolescents is parents high educational expectations and pressure for academic achievement. Stress is a state of mind involving demand on physical or mental energy, a state or circumstance that disturbs the normal, physical and mental health of a person. Stress is a consequence of or a general response to an action or situation that places special physical or psychological demands, or both, on a person. As such, stress involves an interaction of the person and the environment. According to Hans Selye (1974) stress is a response of the body to any stimulus that upset the individuals homeostasis. Any experience that affects ones homeostasis is considered to be stress (Rice, 1992). Hans Selye further defined stress as the nonspecific response of the body to demand made upon it. Stress is a condition and the stimuli causing it called stressors or triggers. Stress can be either positive or negative and can be further divided into two groups which are external and internal (Selye, 2009). Early in the 20th century, it was believed that children and adolescents could not suffer from depression. Later in the century, psychologists changed their minds and accepted that children can get depressed, however many agreed childhood depression is different from adult depression (Clarizio, 1989). A major cause or trigger of depression in the adolescents is thought to be stress. A predisposition to depression may also play a role; nonetheless, the additive stresses of every day adolescent life often appear to trigger depression (Clarizio 1989). There is a complex relationship between depression and suicide. Many depressed patients are suicidal and conversely most but not all suicidal individual manifest depressive mode and symptoms if not depressive illness (Pfeffer, 1989.) Adolescence can be a crucial phase in every ones life. There can be a lot emotional upheaval and stress. Adolescents can experience stress from family discord at home as well as having difficulties with peer relationships at school and academic performance. Adolescence during this period under goes with major changes body changes, change in thought pattern, and changes in feelings. Strong feelings of stress, confusion, fear and uncertainty, as well as pressure to succeed, and the ability to think about things in new ways influence a teenagers problem solve and decision making abilities. Majority of the adolescents undergo stress, whatever the sources may be internal or external it hampers the major functioning of the body. Most of the youngsters face multiple problems in their life. Each individual has to cope with different kinds of pressures laid down by the society and family. On the verge of coping those pressures, an individual himself or herself unconsciously frames a net and is caught in the same. Most of the students are pseudo they keep their own self in a rosy world and when they are confronted with the actual situation, they are unable to handle and thus it throws them to a stressful situation. The present study aim on the level of depression, anxiety, stress in the urban and the rural students. Contemporary views on the structure of negative emotion have largely arrived from the well documented observation that scores from various instruments designed to measure the levels of depression and anxiety tend to be highly correlated. (Clark and Watson 1991), and high rates of co morbidity exist among the anxiety and mood disorders (Andrew,1996). Clark and Watson (1991) proposed a tripartite model of anxiety and depression, which claims that both states are characterized by symptoms of elevated negative affect or general distress (example, distress, irritability),but that anhedonia (low levels of positive effect, eg. happiness, confidence, enthusiasm) is specific to depression and physiological hyper arousal ( autonomic symptoms, example trembling , sweating) is unique to anxiety. An urban area is characterized by higher population density and vast human features in comparison to areas surrounding it. Urban areas may be cities, towns or conurbations, but the term is not commonly extended to rural settlements such as villages and hamlets. Urban areas are created and further developed by the process of urbanization. Measuring the extent of an urban area helps in analyzing population density and urban sprawl, and in determining urban and rural populations. Rural areas or the countryside are areas of land that are not urbanized, though when large areas are described, country towns and smaller cities will be included. They have a low population density, and typically much of the land is devoted to agriculture and there may be less air and water pollution than in an urban area. About 80 percent of the Indian population lives in villages. When travelling through the length and breadth of this subcontinent, one can really visualize the difference between rural and urb an in India. There is a big difference between urban and rural India. One of the major differences that can be seen between rural India and urban India is their standards of living. People living in urban India have better living conditions than those living in the rural parts of India. There is a wide economic gap between rural urban India. Rural India is very poor when compared to urban India. Another difference that can be seen between urban and rural India, is their education. In rural India, the parents seldom educate their children, and instead, make their children work in the fields. Poverty, and lack of sufficient infrastructure, can be attributed to the lack of education in rural India. Methodology Design: The research design used in this study is ex-post facto research design,as it explores the already existing causal conditions between the considered sample groups. The hypothesized the level of depression anxiety stress is higher in the urban school student then the rural school student background.To choose the participants purposive sampling methods were employed Sample The participants consisted of 60 students belonging to the age group of 14-15 years studying in rural and urban high schools. The sample of the study drawn from two schools one from the metropolitan city of Hyderabad and the other from Nagarkurnool,Mahboobnagar district. The students were divided into two groups of 30 each, namely urban and rural. Instruments Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale: In the present study, DASS-42 versin of the perep pencil test was used on the 10th STD students studying in urban and rural high schools. The DASS is a 42- item self report instrument designed by Lovibond and Lovibond (1995), to measure the three related negative emotional states of depression, anxiety and stress. Each of the three DAS scales consists of 14 items divided into subscales of 2to 5 items having similar content to make up a total of 42 items which are placed in a random order in these scales. The depression scales assesses dysphoria, hopelessness, devaluation of life, self-deprecation, lack of interest or involvement, anhedonia and inertia (Lovibond, S.H.Lovibond,P.F.;1995). The anxiety scale contains autonomic arousal, skeletal muscle  effects, situational anxiety and subjective experience of anxious affect (Lovibond et al., 1995). The stress scale being sensitive to chronic non-specific arousal assesses difficulty in relaxing, ner vous arousal, and being easily upset or agitated, irritable or over-reactive and impatient(Lovibond et al.,1995). The items are to be rated on a 4 point Likert Scale of 0 to 3. the option 3 to 0 signify how the sentence applied to the individual with the response ranging in the past week. The rating scale is as follows: 0 Did not apply to me at all 1 Applied to me to some degree, or some of the time. 2 Applied to me a considerable degree, or a good part of the time. 3 Applied to me very much, or most of the time. The option the participant chooses for each item (ie.0,1,2or 3) is regarded as the score for that item and the sum of the relevant items belonging to each one of the three subscales gives the scores for that subscale. These scores are then interpreted to determine the DAS level of the participant. Crawford and Henry (2003) found the internal consistency of the DASS subscales to be high with Cronbachs alphas of 0.94, 0.88 and 0.93 for depression, anxiety and stress respectively. According to Lovibond et al.(1995) the reliability scores of the scales in terms of Cronbachs alpha scores rate the Depression scale at 0.91, the Anxiety scale at 0.84 and the Stress scale at 0.90 in the normative sample. The measns and standard deviations for each scale are 6.34 and 6.97 for depression, 4.7 and 4.91 for anxiety and 10.11 and 7.91 for stress respectively.(Lovibond et al.,1995) Procedure: The test was administered on a one to one basis. Each participant was approached and was briefed about the purpose of the study. The consent was taken before conducting the test and was allowed to withdraw from the study whenever the participant wanted. The questionnaire was given to the subject and was asked to answer the questionnaire carefully based on how many times their parents might have used it. Instructions on paper were read out by the researcher in order to clear all doubts. The participant was asked to work through the items as quickly and as accurately as possible, including a cross mark against the appropriate opinion. Every doubts and any kind of ambiguity that arose in the participants mind were clarified. After the test was accomplished, the researcher expressed her gratitude to the participant for the cooperation. Later the questionnaire was collected and was statistically analyzed by the researcher. The descriptive statistics, Mean and Standard Deviation and the in ferential statistics t-ratio and p-value are used for analysis of the data.