Draft of Abbreviated Quantitative Research Plan

This abbreviated quantitative research plan includes an introduction, a purpose statement, viable research questions and hypotheses and a research plan. This quantitative study focuses on whether and to what extent cognitive appraisals, coping skills, and social support affect the management of stress in non-traditional college students.

Introduction
Stress has become pervasive in the lives of many individuals, and stress has been found to profoundly affect mental health, physical well-being, productivity, performance, and decision making as well as exerts a tremendous burden on biological systems (Hildebrandt, Yehuda, & Olff, 2012). This study focuses on whether and to what extent cognitive appraisals, coping skills, and social support affects the management of stress in non-traditional college students. To adequately determine the effects of these factors, it is important to understand the experiences of these individuals in stressful situations. A survey design was chosen to obtain a cross-section of the personal experiences of individuals in stressful situations and whether and to what extent their management of stress is affected by cognitive appraisals, coping skills, and social support. Surveying a sample of the non-traditional college population provides the most accurate and subjective experiences of this population and how their use of cognitive appraisals, coping skills, and social support affects their management of stress.

Purpose Statement
The purpose of this study is to determine whether and to what extent cognitive appraisals, coping skills, and social support affects non-traditional college students' management of stress. Since stress has become pervasive in the lives of many individuals, and has a tremendous affect on physiological health, determining the effects of cognitive appraisals, coping skills, and social support is a valuable addition to the knowledge base. The survey will help generalize the experiences of the general non-traditional college population and their management of stress through appraisals, coping skills, and social support. During the last several years, colleges have seen a great increase in the number of adults returning to college (Lane, Michelau, Palmer & Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, 2012). Their stress is idiosyncratic to other populations because they may be managing school, family, and a job.

                                           Viable Research Questions and Hypotheses

Viable Research Questions

Do cognitive appraisals affect how individuals view and manage stress?

Do coping skills affect how individuals view and manage stress?

Does having social support affect how individuals view and manage stress?

These research questions can be answered by observing responses to the survey. The responses can be measured by utilizing a Likert-type scale and assigning numerical value to the scaled responses. Research has implicated cognitive appraisals, coping skills, and social support in successful stress management and this research will add to the knowledge the extent to which these factors affect stress management.

Hypotheses

Cognitive appraisals affect how individuals view and manage stress.

Coping skills affect how individuals view and manage stress.

Social support affects how individuals view and manage stress.

These directional hypotheses are measureable by determining whether and to what cognitive appraisals, coping skills, and social support affect how individuals view and manage stress.

Research Plan
The purpose of this study is to determine the characteristics of a sample of non-traditional college students between the ages of 28 and 60 to determine the effects of cognitive appraisals, coping skills, and social support on stress management. The sample will consist of students' responses to a notice for participants posted at the local university. Depending on the number of responses, all, or a randomly selected number of participants will be selected. This population was chosen because of the assumed impact of stress on non-traditional students. The survey design is the preferred type of data collection procedure for this study and it will utilize a self-administrated questionnaire. The preference for survey design is guided by the need to obtain direct responses regarding the subjective experiences of these non-traditional college students in stressful situations with regard to their use of cognitive appraisals, the implementation of coping skills, and having a support network of family and friends. The survey instrument used for this survey was designed for this research. The dependent variable in all three hypotheses is the management of stress. The independent variables are cognitive appraisals, coping skills, and social support.

The content areas of the survey are to identify to what extent participants identify and utilize their social networks and if and to what extent they utilize coping skills. Further, it will identify how they cognitively appraise stressful situations. For data analysis and interpretation, the study will report and analyze the number of returned surveys as well as the number on non-returned surveys. Wave analysis will be utilized to determine if responses change from the beginning to the latter part of the return process (Creswell, 2009). Descriptive analysis will be provided for the independent and dependent variables in the study and will identify the means, standard deviations, and range of scores for these variables. An analysis of variance will be utilized to make comparisons between the independent variables.

References

Creswell, J. (2009). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Hildebrandt, T., Yehuda, R., & Olff, M. (2012). Effects of Traumatic Stress Molecular and Hormonal Mechanism. In , European Journal of Psychotraumatology (pp. 1-123). Co- Action Publishing.

Lane, P., Michelau, D. K., Palmer, I., & Western Interstate Commission for Higher, E. (2012). Going the Distance in Adult College Completion: Lessons from the "Non-Traditional No More" Project. Western Interstate Commission For Higher Education.