Interests, Barriers, Stress, and Resilience of High School Students: A Caring Christian Religious Education Teacher

Abstract

This study identified the interests and barriers felt by students as an illustration of the concern of Christian Religious Education (CRE) teachers. This study aims to describe the level of stress and resilience of students, their preferred coping strategy, and the correlation of stress with student resilience. This research uses a quantitative approach with a nonexperimental design. A total of 147 respondents was sampled from the 700 teenage students population. The age range of students is 16 – 18. A survey questionnaire was used to investigate the stress and resilience scale of students, namely the Perceived Stress Scale which consists of 10 items (PSS-10), and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale which consists of 10 items (CDRS-10). The results from the descriptive analysis show that very few students have an interest in learning CRE and the highest barrier is self-confidence. The results from the descriptive analysis show that the level of stress that students feel is mostly in the middle category and the low category. The level of student resilience is mostly in the medium and high categories. The results of the correlation analysis show that stress is related to resilience where the direction of the correlationis negative. It means that the students who scored higher on PSS-10 is more likely to have difficulty or lower survival capacity (low endurance score). Therefore, to reduce the impact of stress so that the students have high resilience, coping strategy efforts by CRE teachers must be carried out with high concern, so that students can focus on interests and can face various barriers.