Academic Stress and Its Variations by School Sector and Gender in Secondary Schools of Quetta

Abstract

This quantitative study was conducted to examine the level of academic stress among students of public and private secondary schools in Quetta, Balochistan, and to compare differences by school sector and gender. The study was based on a positivist philosophy and a cross-sectional, comparative survey design, adopting the theoretical models of stress interaction and gender role theory as its basis. For this, 1,000 students were selected through stratified and systematic random sampling from the total population (208,531 students) of public (112) and private (575) secondary schools in Quetta, 500 from each sector, and 991 valid responses were obtained after excluding 9 incomplete cases. The data were collected using a reliable and validated Academic Stress Scale, with acceptable reliability (.720). The results revealed that students experienced medium academic stress (M = 3.13) overall, with exam-related stress being the highest and infrastructure-related stress the lowest. Although there was no significant difference in overall stress between students in public and private schools, students in both sectors experienced different types of stress in seven of eight sub-domains. Furthermore, gender-based stress revealed that boys were exposed to significantly more stress than girls in almost all domains, except for infrastructure-related stress, where girls scored higher. Thus, the study concludes that the relationship between academic stress and the school sector and gender is deeply dependent on the local socio-cultural context; therefore, a single policy is not sufficient for both sectors and students of both genders. It is therefore strongly recommended that schools urgently develop gender-specific psychosocial support systems and targeted intervention strategies by school sector to effectively and sustainably improve the psychological well-being of Quetta students.