Children's perceptions of stressful events

Abstract

Children's responses to the Feel-Bad Stress Inventory II of Lewis et al (1984) were studied to analyse whether girls perceived a different level of stress in their lives than boys. Thus a representative sample of 379 children (200 girls and 179 boys) coming from the 5th and 6th year classes of four different Primary schools were asked to answer a questionnaire by rating how 'bad' they would/did feel if each event described in the questionnaire was to happen or had happened to them. Also children were requested to rate how often such event happened in their lives over the past scholastic year. It was found that girls perceived as having no (statistically significant) different level of stress in their lives than boys. However for 14 out of the 29 items employed in this study, girls rated these events significantly (at the 0.1 level or beyond) more 'bad' than boys. The remaining 15 items had differences in mean 'badness' ratings that were not statistically significant. Moreover it was found that out of 8 items which had differences in mean 'frequency' ratings that were statistically significant at the 0.1 level or beyond, boys rated 6 events as occurring more frequently in their lives than girls. On the other hand although girls and boys differed in the magnitude of their mean 'badness' ratings, the rank order of the mean 'badness' ratings for girls and boys was highly correlated.