Page 38 - IJPS-11-4

International Journal of
Population Studies Stress in early adulthood

were present between stress at age 18 or 21 and perceived adolescent stress and work stress at age 28 attenuated,
stress at age 28 (OR 2.5 and 3.1, respectively). Regarding whereas only small attenuations were observed in relation
the accumulated stress measure, those who reported to general perceived stress at age 28 among those who
high-stress levels at ≥2-time points during adolescence had completed education within less than 2 years. A poor
had 2.4 (1.6 – 3.6) and 5.5 (3.7 – 8.0) increased odds of work-life balance was found to be the psychosocial work
reporting high perceived stress or high work stress at age 28 environment aspect with the greatest impact on the
after adjustment for gender and socioeconomic measures. association between adolescent stress and young adult
When further adjusted for measures of temporary work stress, whereas temporary employment did not have
employment and psychosocial work environment, the any important impact. We found an interesting difference
association with perceived stress at age 28 decreased to between those with short or longer work experience
3.7 (2.4 – 5.6) and was still statistically significant, and the (time since completion of education) regarding the
association with work stress decreased to 1.5 (0.9 – 2.4) but influence of temporary employment and psychosocial
was no longer statistically significant. For both outcomes, work environment on stress. It seems that temporary
ORs increased as the number of stress time points in the employment and the psychosocial work environment
accumulated stress measure increased. When adjusting for aspects play an important role in explaining the association
one psychosocial work environment variable at a time, all between adolescent stress and work stress or perceived
variables resulted in attenuation of the estimates, with poor stress at age 28 among the more experienced participants
work-life balance explaining a big part of the association (those with more than 2 years since completed education).
between stress during adolescence and young adult work For the less experienced (those with less than 2 years since
stress, whereas adjustment for temporary employment did completion of education), temporary employment and
not change the estimate (results not shown). In addition, the psychosocial work environment did not, to the same
we made supplementary analyses, adjusting all analyses degree, affect the high general perceived stress level.
for the other outcome (adjusting perceived stress for work This finding indicates that experiencing stress during
stress and vice versa). This resulted in attenuations of the adolescence increases the likelihood of perceiving the
estimates to a maximum of 0.2 (results not shown).
transition into the labor market as stressful. This effect
Table 3 displays the associations between accumulated is particularly pronounced among individuals with less
stress during adolescence and perceived stress or work work experience, indicating that the stress burden is not
stress at age 28 stratified by time since completion of solely due to poor employment or poor psychosocial
education. working environment conditions. The result implies that
Overall, crude and adjusted measures of both perceived psychosocial pressure on young individuals can arise from
stress and work stress at age 28 are quite similar among other areas of life than work. This resonates with research
those who have completed their education more than that argues that young individuals are expected to perform
or less than two years ago. However, adjusting for well in all areas of life, expectations which potentially lead to
gender, temporary employment, and psychosocial work psychosocial stress (Madsen, 2018; Petersen, 2016; Sørensen
environment variables attenuated the associations between et al., 2017) as well as to other mental health problems such
accumulated adolescent stress and perceived stress at age as depressive symptoms and anxiety (Johnson et al., 2018;
28 to non-statistically significant associations among those Kaasbøll et al., 2021). In the performance society, young
who had completed their education more than 2 years individuals increasingly measure and evaluate themselves
ago, whereas statistically significant associations were through their performances, and it becomes absolutely
seen in the group with less than 2 years since completion crucial to appear successful both in youth and work life,
of education, after adjustment for temporary employment which can have negative consequences for the transition to
and psychosocial work environment factors (if ≥2 stress work life (Semmer et al., 2007).
time points [OR: 3.3]; 95% CI: 1.5 – 7.1). Previous studies documented that a range of childhood
physical and mental health, socioeconomic, and school-
4. Discussion related factors (Winding et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2018),

The major finding of this study was the consistent as well as student burnout (Robins et al., 2018), affect later
association between perceived stress in adolescence and perceived work environments and work stress. At the same
perceived stress or work stress at age 28, especially if the time, it is well known that a demanding work environment
stress was accumulated during adolescence. Moreover, among young workers, like experiencing high psychological
we observed that when adjusting for the psychosocial demands and a low level of social support, is associated
work environment variables, the associations between with several different mental health problems, including

Volume 11 Issue 4 (2025) 32 https://doi.org/10.36922/ijps.0864