Stress and Adjustment: A Causal Study

Exploring the Cyclical Relationship between Stress and Adjustment in Children and Adolescents

Abstract

Various researches conducted on children and adolescents have focused on the relationship between life events and range of dependent measure assumed to index problems of psychological adjustment in some way. All these research effort provide a reasonable support for the link between stress and adjustment indices. However, it is pertinent to point out that the stress and adjustment relationship is a reciprocal one in nature i.e., the amount of stress individuals experience may also be partly due to their prior functioning (Billings and Moos, 1982). The sample consisted of 240 male student’s age between 12 to 15, who were willing to participate in the study. Life Events Scale for Indian Chidren (LESIC), Adjustment Inventory, PGI Well- Being Scale ware use for this research data. It can be seen from the results that the number of stressful events (SLE) are highly correlated with weighted stress score (SS) (correlations ranging from .95 to .98). It can be a point of further research that the stress adjustment relationship is cyclical in nature and the influence of adjustment on stress is more than influence of stress on adjustment or voice versa.