Table of Contents
Abstract
My field research proposal paper is about me investigating the stress in college student athletes and how it affects them in current time and also in the future. I will explain every college student that is currently enrolled in school, and what they deal with, also I will explain the college student athletes that have graduated and how the stress they were going through when they were in college how it affected them with health problems. I will give a hypothesis which is if a college student are athletes then they go through more stress then a regular college student who does not play a sport.
I will explain this hypothesis and try to prove my hypothesis as best as I can, with information that I find online, and with a survey that I take of other students. As the research goes on there will different types of stress that are being discussed. The main point to my field research proposal topic is to try and find a solution to the stress caused to athletes, and put some of my studies and a solution that I figure out studying other people. Stress can have a positive effect but at the same time it can have a negative effect on the human body. The best way of measuring stress is a self-questionnaire. There will be a methodology of 10 student athletes, who attend or have attended Montreat College.
Methodology
This study will follow groups of three student-athletes per sports and year level of each sex, which is 3 freshmen, male soccer players, 3 freshmen female soccer players and so on for every sport that is at Montreat College. The study will mainly be focused on the 10 sports at Montreat College, which are soccer, basketball, softball, baseball track and field, cross country, tennis, volleyball, lacrosse, and golf (Both boys and girls). There will be three traditional students of each sex from each of the class level. The reason for this is because it provides a steady control group of the normal stress faced by the college student athletes. In the research, there will be variables and try to control these variables as best as possible. A suggestion of students with similar majors are chosen across the field, with the terms of academic difficulty, similar and if not with the same number of credit hours, similar work schedules, and also similar housing arrangements.
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The methodology of this investigation would be of weekly sweat donations of 4-6 mL to contain both cortisol and A-amylase for stress response. There will also be a monthly 2-part questionnaire, these questions will include 1. Please describe your most stressful experience from the current school month and 2. Explain how your stress level have changed from the previous month. But also going along with these monthly questionnaires there will be semester questionnaires and also yearly questionnaires to track the overall progress of the student athlete.
The use of sweat was determined to not bother the student athlete and cause any harm to them, also to not consume a lot of their time, which would be easy to get right after a practice. At the same time the questionnaire can be asked since the questions will not take a whole lot of time but also at the appropriate time throughout the year will provide the perfect information/ research to obtain the necessary data. This will also have no effects on the students, as if I were to do a research extracting blood for them and causing them to miss practice for that day. Not to mention that withdrawing blood from the athlete can consume a lot of their energy and a lot of their time. Sometimes the students will also not give consent for a research.
In order to accommodate for different seasons of sports the study would be conducted over a whole year so as to incorporate off season stress investigations and also allow the study to follow the S-A though their sports’ season in its entirety and allow comparisons of peak sport competition importance in relation to stress rather than simply relating physical dates with stress, as the important part of this investigation is to analyze stress in relation to key parts of a S-A season and or academic calendar rather than simply relating stress to dates, as different sports face their finals and conference tournaments at different times.
Results
The statistics in this study would be split evenly between a qualitative questionnaire, that would allow me to analyze self-reported values for stress and the factor that the students themselves would have seen as stressful. Not only that but it would allow us to see how the students would determine their own levels of stress and how the stress has changed over time. And as the students see the changes, they too would be employed to ask of themselves, what has changed and how these changes have affected their own personal engagement with the stress inducing factors. Also, more results and more stress to college student athletes is travel, interpersonal issues with teammates and coaches, and increased practice during the athletic season. Some health risk would be not enough sleep, exhaustion, digestive problems, and elevated anxiety. With the increase in stress for the students then the students will most likely practice unhealthy habits and experience health problems in the long run.
The reason of finding these answers would come from the sweat of the athletes that were withdrawn from after practice. As being a person involved in a sport, does the stress affect our sport performance? And my answer to that is yes it does, with results from the sweat it shows that there will be an increase in performance anxiety. This means it does not allow you to play relaxed, confident, and to stay focus in your competition.
Discussion
I believe that there is enough evidence in literature to support my hypothesis as a valid and testable statement. The actual outcome of studying stress in college student athletes remains unknown and a definitive common on expected outcomes cannot be made with academic integrity beyond a hypothesis as there is truly no way to know the need for testing. Limitations include but are not limited to Montreat being a Christ-centered school as faith may directly or indirectly affect stress. College athletes have a lot of mandatory obligations and will do most anything to achieve the highest level of success in their respective sports as possible.
However, these athletes are endangering their health by acquiring sleep debt by sleeping less than the required ten hours per night. This sleep deprivation can cause lack of concentration and decreased performance in these athletes, which commonly leads to injuries. The ultimate question raised is: how do college and collegiate athletics affect students and student athletes? Do they build character and improve stress resistances, or do they lead to chronic stress and reduce overall health?
Literature Review
The student athlete has been around for as long as education and sports have been invented. The combination of these two brings great character development, academic, and physical refinement. But at the same time this brings a tremendous amount of stress and despair, whether it’s because of missing a shot or failing a paper. Stress is known and has always been known to be one of the least expected to kiss us, being linked to health problems and disease-causing pathologies. Stress is kind of difficult to define, we have many different definitions for it.
Most commonly we define stress with a focus on the human or animal response in general to situations incurring the fight or flight response from our nervous system and bodily physiology as primarily mediated by the “stress hormones.” (McEwen 2017) Not all stress has to be innately characterized as negative, Hans Selye as the forefather of stress research and study coined the terms distress for the negative iteration if stress, and eustress as the positive and enhancing form of stress (Selye, 1956).
The difference being that eustress is innervated as after short term exposure to stress hormones, and according to one study published in Psych neuroendocrinology this exposure can and does help us on a cellular level, with these events triggering “improved mitochondrial function and neuroprotective effects” (Aschbacher, 2013). Now going back to the student athlete, it seems that such a relationship between acute stress, like a sporting event and physiological benefit seems to be in favor. The amount of stress student athletes go through is more than a student who does not do a sport in college. The reason for that is because in the student athlete life, we still have the same deadlines then a regular student and when an athlete is in season there is away games that we have to deal with which makes it difficult to do some of the work. I’m a college student athlete and sometimes I do my work the last day it is due and stay up super late to finish it and have it ready to turn in on time. Causing so much stress to come my way, having little to no sleep.
When it comes to a person’s stress over taking a shot or passing a test, the stress could be greatly reduced if the person has studied hard or practiced extensively and feels like they have a lot of control over the situation. By this marker, student-athletes could ideally have an abundance of Eustress in their lives leading to numerous positive effects (Kohn, 2017). These sources present us with a better understanding of positive and negative effects that stress can garner, and present work already done on this topic providing us with further evidence and tools for generating a hypothesis.
When proposing the experiment, I also included the three different types of stress. Which are Acute stress, episodic acute stress, and chronic stress. The most common form of stress is the Acute stress it comes from demands and pressures of the recent past and anticipated demands and pressures of the near future (Smith 2016). The next one is episodic acute stress which comes from ceaseless worry. The symptoms of Episodic stress are persistent tension, headaches, migraines, hypertension, chest pain, and heart disease. The way to treat this stress has to come from professional help and this can take up to months or even years. The last one is chronic stress, this stress wears people away from day after day, and year after year. Chronic stress destroys bodies, minds and lives. The reason this stress comes into people’s life’s is because they do not see a way out of a miserable solution (Smith 2016). More of the symptoms include being suicidal, violence, heart attack, stroke and sometimes even cancer.
The type of stress that college student’s athletes have is Chronic stress, the reason for that being is because chronic stress is long term stress (Porter,2017). The reason it is not acute stress, is because acute stress is short term, an example of short term stress will be like getting stuck in traffic, or someone breaking into your house. Since chronic stress is long term examples for that can be missing a goal and losing the champion ship final, the pain would be going on for probably a life time. It could also be failing a class because of a sport or even falling a test because you didn’t get to study for it because you had an away game. The college students of America already struggle enough with college loans and college classes, but also the college student’s athletes, I believe struggle a bit more than a regular college student.
