Academic Stress among JSS High School Students in Mysuru and Chamarajanagar districts: A Cross-sectional study

Background In today's world, students face academic stress which leading to anxiety, poor performance in academics and many other issues like nervousness, panic attacks and depression mainly derived from grades, parental pressure, and competition between the students. With the above background study aims to estimate the prevalence and assess the associated factors of academic stress among high school adolescents. Method A cross-sectional study was conducted to explore the academic stress among JSS high school students of Mysuru and Chamarajanagar districts. A total of 379 were selected through Probability proportional to size (PPS) sampling. Structured questionnaire was used to assess the academic stress among participants. Collected data was entered in Microsoft Excel and analyse the entered data using SPSS V.26. Descriptive statistics like frequency and percentage were used and to assess the significance of differences between categorical data, a chi-square test was performed and the statistical significance level was set at 5%. Result Among 379 students, 248 (65.43%) students reported academic stress, while 131 (34.56%) reported as normal. The high school students comprising of 48% boys and 52% girls had different levels of stress namely extreme stress (0.8%), high stress (16.09%), moderate stress (34%) and slight stress (39.9%) when assessed using the Academic Stress Scale. Conclusion Stress among high school students affects academic performance and their achievement. Our findings revealed that there was a need for school administrators to improve interpersonal relationships and need of developing effective counselling and intervention strategies to reduce stress. Key words: Stress, Adolescents, High school students, Academic stress, Emotional Well-being