Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Jen Smith is running focus groups on the various sources behind student stress.

Smith decided to form the focus groups after results of a survey indicated that stress and anxiety had risen among the undergraduate study body.

These groups, which will consist of undergraduate sophomores, juniors, and seniors, will help the administration find ways to reduce unnecessary academic stress.

“Between 2013 to 2017, we went from our students feeling average amounts of stress to being not only being overall more stressed, but more stressed than students at peer institutions,” Smith said.

Though Smith and other Arts and Sciences faculty began speaking with students last spring, the faculty heard a such a wide variety of answers that they made plans to conduct larger focus groups in the fall.

“We were hearing so many different things that we didn’t feel like after meeting and talking with these students we had a sense of what policies we had that—if we changed them—would help all students,” Smith said.

Smith is planning to use the information that she receives from the focus groups to create a survey that will go to the entire undergraduate student body.

“We’re hoping the focus groups will give us some ideas to test with the student body as a whole and then go from there to get the faculty to make some changes.” Smith said “How we structure moving forward depends on the information we get back.”

Psychology professor Tim Bono, who specializes in positive psychology and college student development, believes that the College of Arts and Sciences administration is taking steps in the right direction.

“I think the University is doing a good job collecting data on student stress and working closely with the student health center to make sure that students are aware of resources and people that they can talk to,” Bono said.

Jordan Worthington, assistant director of Mental Health Outreach and Programming at the Habif Health and Wellness Center, also believes the University is working productively to reduce student stress.

“We all need to continue having conversations about the roots of stress on campus and what we can do to make college a less stressful experience,” Worthington said. “Hopefully in ways that students feel like they have the tools to mitigate stress in a healthy way.”

In her surveys, Smith noticed differences in stress between different demographic groups, a topic she wants to research more in the future.

“We’ve talked about recruiting groups of a single identity. That’s not what we’re doing for this round because we’re trying to gather more general information.” Smith said, “We probably will work to convene identity-based focus groups to explore how different students are experiencing stress based on those components of their identity.”

Similar to Smith, Bono thinks that it is important that the University works to specifically help minority students.

“There’s a lot of research showing that stress levels are rising across the board, but they can be especially pronounced for students who are members of marginalized identities; so, students of color, LGBTQIA* students, first generation students [and] low-income students,” Bono said.

For Smith, the goal of the new focus groups is to create open lines of communication between the administration, faculty and students that will help the faculty find ways to combat academic stress.

“I want the faculty to better understand what is stressing students so that we can respond better.” Smith said.