Examining Academic Stress and Its Source Among Nursing Professional Students (Ners) Using the Modified Perception of Academic Stress Scale (PAS)

Abstract

Introduction: Nurse professional students experienced academic stress due to the changing mode of learning to online learning. Academic stress also have a negative impact on the achievement of nursing profession students' competencies. There is an urgent need study to measure academic stress experienced by nursing professional students using a tailored and valid instrument.Method: This study is a quantitative study used survey design to measure academic stress in nursing students at the professional stage using a modified questionnaire from the Perceived Academic Stress Scale (PAS). There were 339 nursing students in profession phase from private college in Yogyakarta. Respondents were obtained by consecutive sampling technique. The psychometric testing of the modified PAS academic stress scale attempts to determine the instrument's internal, external, and reliability for use with nursing professional students. Internal validity was determined in two methods in this study: by examining corrected item-total correlation and by doing exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on each produced item. The instrument's external validity is determined by administering it to two specialists in mental nursing and nursing education.Results: The developed instrument has internal consistency reliability of 0.818 (Cronbach’s alpha), there was evidence for content validity, and factor analysis resulted in five correlated and theoretically meaningful factors. Based in this instrument, most students experience moderate academic stress during their learning at the professional program phase.Conclusions: The modified PAS instrument used in this study is a tailored, valid and trustworthy for measuring academic stress of nursing professional students during pandemic Covid-19.