Exploring stressful live events on Indonesian adolescents

Abstract

Adolescence is a turbulent time of normative developmental stress. Adolescents are morevulnerable to the effects of environmental stressors because of their dependence on thefamily. Identifying mechanisms that links life stress to negative mental health outcomesamong adolescents is essential for public health professionals in developing preventiveinterventions to reduce the prevalence of stress-related psychiatric morbidity. Sociologistsand cross-cultural psychologists have contended that different socio-cultural status patternsmediating through social support/coping determine a number of different subjective socialstresses that vary across stratified social and cultural groups in a given society. To answerthat challenge the current study aims to understand those psychological phenomena in acultural context using indigenous approach. This study used a quantitative method with anopen-ended self-administered questionnaire. The participants consisted of 742 students(45% girls; 55% boys) from middle, high, and vocational school in Yogyakarta and Surabayawith an age mean of 15 years old. Most of them are Javanese and their religion is Islam. Theprocedure consisted of giving an item ‘Please write down case(s)/matter(s)/event(s) thatmade you stressed’ to the participants, and then asking them to rate the results from 1 thatmeans ‘so light’ to 100 that means ‘very heavy’. The data from the open-ended question(multiple responses) were analyzed by identifying keywords and were later categorized intothemes by three raters using the indigenous psychology approach. The stressful life events(SLE) in Indonesian adolescents consisted of interpersonal related problems, family relatedproblems, school related problems, self related problems, economy related problems, natureand unpredictable related problems, media and technology related problems, and grief.School related problems, especially the National Examination, were perceived to be themost stressful life events by Indonesian adolescents. The family was perceived to be themajor source of social support for them.