Abstract
The COVID-19 global health emergency has greatly impacted the educational field. Faced with unprecedented stress situations, professors, students, and families have employed various coping and resilience strategies throughout the confinement period. High and persistent stress levels are associated with other pathologies; hence, their detection and prevention are needed. Consequently, this study aimed to design a predictive model of stress in the educational field based on artificial intelligence that included certain sociodemographic variables, coping strategies, and resilience capacity, and to study the relationship between them. The non-probabilistic snowball sampling method was used, involving 337 people (73% women) from the university education community in south-eastern Spain. The Perceived Stress Scale, Stress Management Questionnaire, and Brief Resilience Scale were administered. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (version 24) was used to design the architecture of artificial neural networks. The results found that stress levels could be predicted by the synaptic weights of coping strategies and timing of the epidemic (before and after the implementation of isolation measures), with a predictive capacity of over 80% found in the neural network model. Additionally, direct and significant associations were identified between the use of certain coping strategies, stress levels, and resilience. The conclusions of this research are essential for effective stress detection, and therefore, early intervention in the field of educational psychology, by discussing the influence of resilience or lack thereof on the prediction of stress levels. Identifying the variables that maintain a greater predictive power in stress levels is an effective strategy to design more adjusted prevention programs and to anticipate the needs of the community.
Highlights
Late 2019, the World Health Organization identified a highly contagious virus, the SARS-Cov-2, in the city of Wuhan, China, which caused the “coronavirus disease 2019” or “COVID-19” (Wu et al, 2020, pp. 217–220)
It is possible to differentiate between two situations: (1) a pre-covid situation or Timing=0 understood as the period prior to the confinement in Spain and which spanned from the beginning of the study in May 2019 to the publication of the state of alarm decree and the beginning of the confinement –March 13, 2020-; (2) and a post-covid situation or Timing=1 which started in this research on March 14, 2020 and ended in May 2020
This research examined the psychoeducational variables involved in the health emergency provoked in COVID-19 situation and months prior to the event
Summary
Late 2019, the World Health Organization identified a highly contagious virus, the SARS-Cov-2, in the city of Wuhan, China, which caused the “coronavirus disease 2019” or “COVID-19” (Wu et al, 2020, pp. 217–220). High levels of stress have been reported in college students in pre-confinement studies (Cavallo et al, 2016; Sarrionandia et al, 2018; Taremian et al, 2018). It was found that 84.4% of university students showed stress to some degree, being mild in 33.8%, moderate in 35.4%, severe in 13.2% and extremely severe in 2.8% (Asif et al, 2020) With respect to these data, there is a wide variability in the results as demonstrated by Fares et al (2016) finding in college students a range that went from 20.9 to 90%. It is not yet possible to relate high stress scores to the confinement situation univocally, as such scores may already be present in the population These facts justify the need to investigate current stress levels and other associated variables and compare them with previous situations to the extent that the research design allows for such comparisons
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