A study to explore the emotional intelligence and stress coping strategies among nursing students in selected colleges at Namakkal District- Hermeneutic phenomenological circle approach

Abstract

Background: Emotional intelligence of nursing students helps them to adopt a healthy life style during stress.Coping is one of the wise choices of avoiding frustration which is the end product of stress and burnout. If individual want to handle the stress with effective and appropriate coping he or she should be an emotionally competent with high emotional intelligence. Methods: Participants were selected based on trait exhibited by particular group of interest. So adopted purposive homogenous sampling method for this study. After receiving informed oral consent students at Dhanvantri College of Nursing, Namakkal were adopted as participants for this study .With 5 participant’s data saturation point has been reached and preceded for the analysis. As this study aimed to explore the phenomenon of EI on coping strategy and to provide wide knowledge regarding the phenomenon there was a need to fuse individual’s subjective experience with the hermeneutic circle. So as this study design was Qualitative hermeneutic Phenomenological circle. Age and Birth order of the participants were demographic variable. To understand the concept of EI semi structured questions were framed on the basis of EI domains, all the verbatim reports were analysed by following interpretative phenomenological analysis and coping strategy of participants were expressed by the parent of the participants through mobile phone were recorded and analysed. Results:Participants with high emotional intelligence always deals the stress with their route cause and handle it easily in a problem focused style. Whereas Participants with low emotional intelligence deals stress with emotional focused strategy. And one more new concept (serendipity) were identified that birth order of the participants has greater influence on coping that is those born as second and fourth child shown problem focused coping strategy than the participant who born as first child.