| Abstrakt: |
Academic stress tends to increase throughout students' lives with the growth in the number of activities and their level of demand. Students entering higher education experience this state throughout their course, which can have harmful consequences for their academic performance. To monitor the students' progress and try to understand their level of stress and the possible causes of it, a survey was carried out using the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). The manifest variables (observed, i.e. directly measured) of this internationally validated instrument are measured on a Likert-type scale with five categories, which are considered to operationalize the theoretical concept of Perceived Stress (PS), i.e. latent variable (not directly measured). Based on the complete data sample, obtained from a Portuguese Polytechnic, the total score of PS of each student was calculated and it was found that most students have a moderate level of PS, but that the percentage is higher in women. Confidence intervals were calculated for the medians of the total score of PS, and the non-parametric Mann-Whitney test for independent samples was also used to compare the mean ranks by gender and the difference between them was found to be statistically significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
