The Direct Relationship Between Procrastination and Stress Levels
Group Members: Chen Li, Karen Kohama, and Tamar Waronker
(Rodriguez-Contreras, City College Seminar 3, 2020)
The research question our group will discussed is: how does procrastination affect a student’s stress level? We hypothesize that when placed in a high-pressure situation, a student with a tendency to procrastinate will have lower stress levels then students who do not procrastinate. To begin, we will select a group of randomized college students based on their past procrastination habits. Specifically, procrastination is defined as leaving an assignment to be done 24 hours before the deadline even though the assignment was given a week in advance in their high school years.
Our control group will consist of college students who have never procrastinated in high school. Our experimental group will consist of college students who have procrastinated in high school. This will be further subdivided into different groups who fall in the same range on procrastination scale. The procrastination scale will be defined as have the participants rate their chances of procrastinating on a scale from 0 to 100 (intervals of 10), where 0 is defined as there is no chance of procrastinating while 100 is most definitely going to procrastinate. After dividing our experimental group into appropriate sections, we will send out a survey highlighting 10 different high-pressure situations. The participants will note their stress levels based on the perceived stress scale (PSS) when placed in each of the hypothetical situations.
As college students, we are aware that (1) some of our peers procrastinate more than others and (2) stress levels vary. We want to see if there is a potential causal relationship between tendencies to procrastinate and stress levels. Additionally, we can eliminate the existing stigma surrounding procrastination through our findings.
