First Generation College Students

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First-generation College Student’s Studies
College can be a very stressful time in a student’s life. Researchers conducted three studies regarding the relationship between financial literacy and the completion of a degree, and if students have a harder time adapting to university than continuing -generation female students based on their current involvement with their own parents. They also measured the total amount of stress a student might have about attending university. This literature review will provide first generation male and female college students reasoning’s why they should not be hindered in graduating with a college degree compared to continuing-generation students; following with a correct support system, stress …show more content…

The researchers were diverse, such as receiving information from, White, Latina, Asian American and “other ethnic groups” (Sy, Fong, Carter, Boehme & Alpert, 2011). These studies were important to conduct because college can be a very stressful time in someone’s life and there are several factors that play into succeeding. It was also important to see if a completion of a degree was related to motivational factors, and to see if a student is in current contact with family members, emotionally and physically; because if a student feels alone it may be harder to succeed. Stress plays a huge role as well, because continuing to build up stress and not releasing it in a healthy way will cause problems in college. Especially, if an individual has gone through a new experience beforehand, it would cause less stress as oppose to doing it for the first time. According to the research, students struggle more in their first year of college as far as stress, feeling isolated, and not having access to the right social support systems (Barry, Hudley, Kelly, & Chan, …show more content…

A confounding variable could be the student’s individual mental health. They could experience more stress or anxiety than others. The second gap is that the researchers should have divided the studies by age groups. A freshman could range from 18 years of age to 30 years of age. There is a very large gap between age and development. These gaps need to be addressed because they can cause validity problems within the study. I would suggest sticking with a limited age group. The next gap is that in some of the studies, researchers conducted with solely females, and only one study had both male and females. This could cause a gender problem and bias between studies. Male or female participants should be tested differently. Finally, the last gap that I noticed in the studies was the total participants number. It varies from 204 to 6,560. This is a huge gap and can make the results not valid because it is not fair to say they both have similar issues with the total participants studied. The number should be around the same for all

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