Stress in undergraduate students: knowing the effect of remote activities in the pandemic daily routine

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic brought an unprecedented disruption to society, with this, the impacts fostered by the crisis also extended to educational institutions. The aim of this study was to investigate whether higher education activities can be considered a stressor in a pandemic context. The sample consisted of 136 students with remote academic activities and 131 with suspended academic activities, who answered a sociodemographic questionnaire and an open question about the factors that have raised the level of stress in the months of April, May, June and July 2020. The textual corpus was processed with the aid of the Interface de R pour les Analyses Multidimensionnelles de Textes et de Questionnaires software. As a result, there were several stressors related or not related to academic activities for both groups, although the performance of digital academic activities has been pointed out with great frequency. Thus, digital academic activities are related to the level of stress among students.