Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

Since the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, Black people have struggled for individual freedoms and equality in the United States. The notion that this long-lasting fight for equal rights ended after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s is a fallacy. The battle for equality is by no means finished but an ongoing struggle for a large percentage of our American population. In its broadest sense, Black Lives Matter is a grassroots social movement of activists called to action in the face of repeated instances of Black men and women being murdered in notoriously controversial and unjust circumstances. With the conception of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, a significant contingent of society has pushed to bring forward the voices of underrepresented and unequally treated members of our communities (Lee, 2020). <br/>When formulating a research study, I wanted to combat some common misconceptions about online activism. Living in an online media-dominated age, with the backdrop of a global pandemic and an increasingly polarized political climate, my overarching goal was to observe how social media has contributed to this modern-day civil rights movement. Indeed, this research was conducted during a period of political and cultural divisiveness not experienced in the United States since perhaps the Civil War. Following the 2020 U.S. election where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were elected over Donald Trump and Mike Pence, political polarization has reached a boiling point. As the foremost social movement in the United States during the era of social media, it is of utmost importance we gain a better understanding of how ordinary people, connected by a common cause, built Black Lives Matter.

College students are exposed to stress accumulating from daily challenges, personal relationships, financial struggles, and academic pressure. Stressors can challenge an individual to perform better or serve as a hindrance to academic achievement, depending on the individual’s perception of stressors and capacity to overcome them (Lepine et al., 2004). Optimal levels of stress are beneficial to managing responsibilities in a timely manner, while unmanageable levels of stress can negatively impact motivation and achievement. Higher levels of negatively perceived stress could have measurable consequences on academic outcomes, including lower motivation and lower achievement. This study focuses on examining the prospective relationship between levels of college stress and the academic outcomes, accounting for individual differences in vulnerability to stress. Specifically, I examined whether the associations between stress (T2) and academic outcomes (T3) were moderated by earlier (T1) levels of economic hardship and effortful control as risk and resilience factors, respectively. I predicted that higher levels of college stress would be associated with lower academic motivation and performance. I expected that higher effortful control would show a stronger association between higher academic motivation and achievement with lower college stress levels. I also predicted that higher levels of familial economic hardship would exacerbate the influence of college stress on lower academic motivation and achievement. This study utilized data collected from survey measures administered to students during the transition from high school to college. Results demonstrated a significant negative association between increased college stress and higher academic outcomes. A lack of significant interactions propose that economic hardship does not have negative effects on academic outcomes. The findings of this study will help universities to support students experiencing detrimental levels of stress to improve later academic outcomes.