Coping with Academic Stress: A Study on the Relationship Between Stress and Coping Behaviour among Physiotherapy Students

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Academic stress is defined as the body’s response to academic related demands that exceeds adaptive capability of students. It estimated that 10-30% of students experience some degree of academic stress during their career. Physiotherapy students have attributed academic demands like time demands, amount of material to be learnt, uncertainty about expectation, lack of skill and personal factors as contribution to¬¬¬¬¬ psychological morbidity OBJECTIVE: The study aims at assessing the level of Perceived stress among Physiotherapy students and their coping behaviors with the stress METHOD: It is a cross sectional time of descriptive study that was conducted on 250 physiotherapy students in and around Bangalore. A convenient non probability technique of sampling is used and 207 participants selected for study. RESULTS: The study consisted of 207 Physiotherapy students, majority of the students that is 40.8% were between 18 to 20 years followed by 44% between 21 to 23 years and 6.3% were between 24 to 26 years old. Out of 207 participants, 67.6% were female and 32.4% were male. According to this study 34.8% were 1st year students, 25.6% were 4th years, 25.1% were 2nd years and 14.5% were 3rd year students. Average stress score was 42.82±8.14 and average COPE score was 65.71±12.60. CONCLUSION: As a result, the objectives of this study is to identify the causes of the respondent’s academic stress and the coping mechanisms they employed that have already been met by using the PAS questionnaire and the Brief Cope questionnaire as the instruments.