One of the biggest challenges a doctoral student face is the ability to balance the responsibility of their studies with the other responsibilities they already have. Most doctoral students already have families, work a full or part time job, among other responsibilities of managing a household and other social activities.

My goal for this article, is to show you some of the ways this additional responsibility may impact you, as well as outline some of the many roles most doctoral students play, and how they can serve as a source of stress.

My goal is to make you  aware of some of the sources that causes stress, with the hope that if you’re aware of them at the outset, that you will be better able to prepare for them before your life becomes too stressful.

I believe that preparation is key. The better prepared you are; the more you’re able to eliminate or reduce some of these stressors in order to make your experience more comfortable.

Please read below and let me know what questions you have on this article. I would also appreciate if you would respond to this article by adding any stressor that you may have expereinced, or is  currently experiencing as you go through the doctoral program so that others may learn from your experience.

Thanks you so much for reading my article. Please be on the lookout for the next in the series early next week. Until then, “Feel the FEAR and DO it anyway!”

Roles and Sources of Stress

Parenting or Caregiver Role

Parenting can be a challenging task all by itself; however, when this is just one of the roles for which some adult students are responsible, it can be stressful. The parenting role can be made more difficult if only one is parent doing the job (Deater-Deckard, Sewell, Petrill, & Thompson, 2009) or when there are multiple responsibilities fighting for the set time available to do the job.

Managing multiple roles daily and the stress of guilt felt for leaving the majority of parenting on the remaining parent can have a negative effect on the mother or father, as well as the parent-child relationship (Deater-Deckard et al., 2009).

For the most part, women are more often the providers as well as the receivers of support, as both men and women tend to turn to women for support (Orth-Gomér & Leineweber, 2005). Therefore, the care of an elderly parent falls more frequently on the female than the male (Schulz & Martire, 2004). Lee and Waite (2005) stated that, irrespective of social class, any other role a woman may have should not compete between her primary role of wife or mother. As a result, female students continually struggle between the different roles they play trying to maintain some semblance of self in the process (Vijayasiri, 2011).

Intimate Relationships Role

Intimate relationships can be a double-edged sword, in that these relationships can create stress in some areas of one’s life, while potentially reducing it in others. A partner can provide emotional and financial support (Branscomb, 2006; Hilton, Desrochers, & Devall, 2001); however, when the marital relationship is stressful or the partner does not support the student’s academic pursuits, the marriage can have a negative effect on the stress of performing multiple roles (Branscomb, 2006). Marital relationships can also be strained by the multiple roles involved in being a student, a parent, an employee, and a homemaker (Deater-Deckard et al., 2009). Therefore, while having a partner may help to alleviate stress for the doctoral student, if the relationship is troubled, having a partner may prove to be detrimental for the student managing multiple roles.

Student Role

Chartrand (1990) suggested that spending more time on academic endeavors may mean forgoing family activities and responsibilities and can result in distress for the student and their family. It has been shown that high levels of overall stress can result in depression (O’Leary, 2009), which could severely affect the health of the doctoral student, impacting performance in the multiple roles they perform daily, which can in turn cause conflict within the family relationship.

Homemaker Role

Lee and Waite (2005) reported that traditional ideologies still restrict working mothers, since housework and childcare responsibilities are still viewed as the woman’s responsibility. Current literature shows documentation that American women continue to perform the vast majority of unpaid tasks performed to satisfy the needs of family members or to maintain the home (Pinto & Coltrane, 2009). Despite shifts in gender roles, an inequality remains in the type of work conducted within the home by men and women, and this appears to negatively affect working women (Vijayasiri, 2011).

Recently, however, new data emerged that suggests men are increasing their contributions to household work (Bianchi & Raley, 2005). Depending on the amount of hours a woman works outside the home, men are more encouraged to contribute to household tasks (Cunningham, 2007). In the last several decades, gender roles have also started to become less rigid (Tinklin, Croxford, Duckling, & Frame, 2005), giving hope to mothers that the pressure to complete all of the household and childcare responsibilities may be lessened, as fathers take up more of this responsibility.

Employee Role

Combining the role of student with these other roles is especially problematic, since the domain of school and work are described as greedy institutions because they require high levels of commitment for success (Jacobs & Gerson, 1997). It also is often expected that for women, neither their career nor their responsibilities to childcare or spousal responsibilities should suffer as a result of their involvement in these other roles (Edwards, 1993). Working students may experience conflict in meeting the role demands because of their multiple and varied responsibilities.

Social Role

When time is at a minimum, the first thing to go is spending time with friends. As a result, social relationships may often come at a cost for doctoral students, which can result in a higher amount of stress and psychosocial load (Theorell & Karasek, 1996). This may contribute to an increased stress burden (Berntsson, Lundberg, & Krantz, 2006). Students rely on personal friendships and social support to cope with the stress of doctoral studies (Weber, Metha, & Nelsen, 1997); however, when no time exits for socializing, this becomes a problem. Research shows that students who were able to have the social support of friends reported feeling significantly more satisfied with their lives (Branscomb, 2006).