Week #3

We have moved on in the research process this week from spewing out raw ideas to formulating them to a coherent question. In order to refine this question we worked researching the topic of stress to find out what other studies had been conducted regarding this concept and how researchers had interpreted the data that had been collected. It was surprising to find that negative stress among students is in fact a widely researched topic, at least more than I would have expected. In the last few years it seems that professionals have realized that anxiety is just as prevalent in schools and universities as it is in the workplace. From the five different pieces of literature that were presented by my research group it was made very clear that the level of stress is in fact equal between students and professionals.
 One piece in particular I found  very interesting; it dealt with foreign exchange students who were adapting to the new culture of their host university as well as college life itself. It suggested that cultural transitions can produce their own forms of stress that affect young people uniquely. I think this will be particularly relevant to our research here at Richmond since the majority of students here are new to British customs and culture.
Due to the overwhelming amount of research we have decided to narrow our research question to cover "how" Richmond students in particular deal with stress. It was suggested in a number of the projects we read  that it was all but futile to attempt to measure the level of stress in a student population as there were so many varying factors that could make the results misleading. We have decided to take the advice of our more experienced predecessors and focus our question so as to produce the most accurate and useful results.