학교교육에 적응하지 못하고 중학교를 중퇴한 자는 2만 2천명이 넘는다(1991). 이같은 학교 부적응은 학교스트레스가 원인이 된다는 관점에서, 본 연구는 한·일 양국의 초·중학생이 학교생활에서 어느 정도 스트레스를 인지하고 있으며 그것이 스트레스 반응과 어떤 관련이 있는가를 비교·분석함으로써 학교생활에서 불건강을 초래하는 요인을 예방하고 학생들이 보다 건강하게 학교생활을 할 수 있는 대책을 마련하는데 필요한 정보를 제공하고자 하였다. 그 결과, 아동의 스트레스 주요인은 한·일 아동 모두 「교사·교우관계」, 「공부」, 「규칙」, 「지원결여」였고 중학생은 「교사와의 관계」, 「학업성취」등이었으며 스트레스원의 경향성은 우리나라 학생이 일본의 학생보다 높았고, 스트레스 반응의 표출인 「불쾌 ·분노감정」, 「우울·불안감정」, 「무력감」, 「신체적 반응」에서 한국의 중학생은 모두 「학업성취」와 가장 깊은 관련성이 있는 것으로 밝혀졌으나 일본 중학생은 「교우관계」와 「학업성취」의 영향이 큰 것으로 나타났다.
Recently, a wide variety of maladaptation, such as school refusal or mental disorder, has remarkably increased elementary and junior high school students in Korea and Japan. The increase of stressful events which students experience in their school life is regarded as one of the causes of this phenomenon. In the previous study which attempted to clarify the school stress process(Okayasu et al., 1992) developed the School Stressor Scale for junior high school students(SSS-J) to assess both the frequency and the aversiveness of events which students encounter in their daily school life, and extracted four main factors, i.e., relationship with teachers, relationship with friends, club activities, and achievement. Furthermore, it was found that aggravating relationship with friends highly correlated to depressive-anxious feeling, and achievement did to helplessness. However, the cognitive appraisal of stressful events is considered to be extremely dependent on person variables, such as values, commitments, or general beliefs(Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), which were influenced by the differences of culture, social system, and/or nationality. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to compare the nature of school stress in two countries, Japan and Korea, and to examine the influence of the differences of nationality or educational system on school stress process. 400 Korean and 452 Japanese elementary school students completed stressor scale. The main results were as follows : (a) Korean students evaluated all the events more stressful than Japanese did. (b) Korean students also perceives achievement than Japanese did. 378 Korean and 542 Japanese junior high school students completed SSS-J and Stress Response Scale. The main results were as follows: (a) Korean students evaluated all the events more stressful except for club activities of SSS-J than Japanese did: (b) Korean student also perceives psychological and physical distress more than Japanese did; (c) multiple regression analysis indicated that relationship with friends and achievement could explain each distress more than the other events in both Japanese and Korean students: and (d) relationship with teachers was relatively highly correlated with irritated-angry feeling in Japanese students, but was not in Korean. In summary, Korean students felt the events in school more stressful and showed more distress than Japanese did, and, however, did not differ much from Japanese students on the kind of stressful events which caused psycholosical or physical distress.