Effect of a Stress Reduction Programme on Academic Stress and Coping Skills of First Year Medical Students
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30834/KJP.33.1.2020.187Keywords:
Personality, academic stress, adjustment style, Stress management, negative coping.Abstract
Background: Medical students, especially in the first year of their college life, are under stress. Materials and Methods: Study was conducted on 100 first year medical students. The students were given a semi-structured questionnaire to collect sociodemographic data; they were subsequently administered the Academic Stress Scale and the Adjustment Style Inventory. Then a Structured Stress management session was conducted for them, and they were made to practice many stress coping skills for three weeks, following which the questionnaires were re-administered and data collected. The data were analysed with the chi-square test, independent-sample t-test, paired t-test and Pearson’s correlation.
Results: The academic stress and coping scores showed no difference among both sexes. The academic stress score showed a negative correlation with coping scale (p= 0.019). There was a significant reduction in the academic stress score post-intervention (p<0.001). The scores of adjustment styles also showed a significant improvement, and there was a significant improvement in the total adjustment style score and negative coping score post-intervention (p<0.001). The positive coping score, however, did not show a significant change.
Conclusion: Stress management programmes are effective in reducing academic stress and adjustment styles. The students tend to reduce negative coping skills and better manage stress, post-intervention.
References
Sheela S, Pramod R. Prevalence of stress and its associated factors. Journal of Evolution of Medical and Dental Sciences 2013; 2 (48): 9386-94.
Supe AN. A study of stress in medical students at Seth G.S. Medical College. Jour Postgr Med. 1998; 44(1):1-6.
Abdulghani HM, Al Kanhal AA, Mahmoud ES, Ponnamperuma GG, Alfaris EA. Stress and its effects on medical students: a cross-sectional study at a college of medicine in Saudi Arabia. J Health Popul Nutr. 2011; 29(5):516-22
Soni R, Rastogi P, Taneja P. Study of level of stress in first year MBBS students. Ind Jour Beh Scien. 2007; 7(2): 22-27.
Gangadharan P. Academic stress and coping strategies among undergraduate healthcare professional students in India: A quasi experimental study. International Journal of Current Research. 2014; 6: 9264- 68.
Michie S, Sandhu S. Stress management for clinical medical students. Med Educ. 1994; 28(6):528-33.
Shapiro SL, Shapiro DE, Schwartz GE. Stress management in medical education: a review of the literature. Acad Med. 2000; 75(7):748-59.
Abraham J, Viswasom A. Impact of Counselling Services in Stress Reduction among First Year MBBS Students. Jour Diag Clin Res.2018; 12: 15-18.
Kaliappan KV, Rajendran R. Efficacy of behavioural programme in managing the academic stress and improving academic performance, Jour Pers Clin Stud. 1990; 6: 193-6.
Rajendran R, Kaliappan KV. A factorial study of sources of students’ academic stress. Jour of Psychol Res. 1991; 35: 53-57.
Cherkil S, Gardens SJ, Soman DK. Coping styles and its association with sources of stress in undergraduate medical students. Ind Jour Psychol Med. 2013; 35(4): 389-93
Luo Y, Wang H. Correlation research on psychological health impact on nursing students against stress, coping way and social support.Nurs Educ Tod.2009 Jan;29(1):5-8.
SPSS Inc. Released 2008. SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 17.0. Chicago: SPSS Inc.
Kelly JA, Bradlyn AS, Dubbert PM, St Lawrence JS. Stress management training in medical school. J Med Educ. 1982; 57(2):91-99.
Tisdelle DA, Hansen DJ, St Lawrence JS, Brown JC. Stress management training for dental students. J Dent Educ. 1984;48(4):196-202.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2020 Kerala Journal of Psychiatry
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
