Personal characteristics and styles of coping with stress of nursing students of a university in Turkey

Abstract

Objective: University studentship and the university life itself have the potential to create worry and stress. Nursing education is a hard and stressful process. The purpose of this study is to identify nursing students' ways of coping with stress. Methods: The study was designed as a descriptive and cross-sectional. Target population of this study was all the students who were enrolled in a nursing school of a university located in Turkey. The data were collected "Personal Information Form", developed by the researchers in light of the related literature, with a view to identifying socio-demographic features of the participants and "Ways of Coping Questionnaire" with a view to finding out the ways of coping with stress. Results: The participants of the study were 467 students. An evaluation of the WoCQ sub-scale mean scores of the nursing students in the present study showed that they got 21.15 ± 3.92 from the self-confident style, 14.03 ± 2.87 from the optimistic style, and 12.04 ± 2.97 from the seeking social support. An evaluation of the WoCQ sub-scale mean scores of the nursing students according to grade level shows that first graders got 12.13 ± 2.19 from the submissive style (p = .037), who were pleased with the school tended to be more self-confident and who could not communicate with the opposite sex tended to have a more helpless style (p = .004) in coping with stress. Conclusions: Results of the present study indicate that various factors play a role in nursing students' ways of coping with stress and they seem to cope with stress effectively.

An integrative review on coping skills in nursing students: implications for policymaking

“…; Yesil et al. ). Among the studies reporting the utilization of problem‐focused coping strategy, the most common strategy used to deal with stressors was problem‐solving behaviours (Al Zayyat & Al Gamal ; Chen & Hung ; Hamaideh et al.…”

“…(), Bahadır‐Yılmaz () and Yesil et al. () assessed coping ways in Turkish nursing students using the Revised Ways of Coping Strategies Questionnaire. These nursing students cited a self‐confident approach as their main coping strategy to cope with academic and clinical stressors.…”

“…Twenty-seven studies were included in the review. Eighteen of 29 studies reviewed were conducted in Asia (Al Zayyat & Al Gamal 2014b;Bahadır-Yılmaz 2016;Chan et al 2009;Chen & Hung 2013;Findik et al 2015;Hamaideh et al 2016;Jan & Popescu 2014;Kim 2014;Kim & Han 2015;Latif & Nor 2016;Seyedfatemi et al 2007;Shaban et al 2012;Sheu et al 2002;Yamashita et al 2012;Yehia et al 2016;Yesil et al 2015;Zhao et al 2014), three from North America (Clark et al 2014;Reeve et al 2013;Wolf et al 2015), one from Africa (Hassanein et al 2016), three from Europe (Forn es-Vives et al 2016;Jimenez-Jimenez et al 2013;Por et al 2011), one from South America (Hirsch et al 2015) and two from Australia (Chapman & Orb 2001;Lo 2002).…”

Stress perception, lifestyle behaviors, and emotional intelligence in undergraduate nursing students

“…Use of social support and EI skills by nursing students are in keeping with other study results. [18][19][20][21][25][26][27] Also, in this study, participants reported multiple social support providers, although the size of their social support network was not determined. Lastly, the significant relationship among the three scales of social support: emotional, venting of emotions and instrumental is a selfexplanatory phenomenon and validate the measure used in this study.…”

“…[18,19] Similarly, in Turkey, a recent study found that nursing students who were seeking social support coped better with stress. [20] Further, a study found that nursing students with high EI also reported a large social support network. [21] Both high EI and a large social support network enabled nursing students to better deal with stress through the mediating influence of effective, multiple social interactions.…”