Stress Perception of Second-year Dental Undergraduate Students - A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

Background and Objective: The dental undergraduate students are trained intensely on preclinical skills in their second year added to the regular academic workload. A study on the perception of the stress by these students will provide feedback for the faculty members to do necessary curricular modifications if needed. The aim of this study was to assess the overall stress of the students and the contributing factors. Material and Methods:The modified dental environmental stress questionnaire was administered to 55 second-year undergraduate dental students. The questionnaire had 25 items with the responses on a Likert scale of 0 to 4 for each item. Data analysis was done by descriptive statistics with frequencies and one-way ANOVA with posthoc analysis using SPSS. Results: Majority of the students were having no stress (21.8%) to mild stress (70.9%). Only 7.3% had moderate stress and none were highly stressed in the study population. The academic factors, personal life issues, and professional identity were contributing equally and the faculty relations were significantly less stressful than other factors. The fear of facing parents after failure was perceived to be the top stressor with a mean stress score of 2.1 ±1.5. The difficulty in learning precision manual skills contributed lesser stress (1.25 ± 0.7) and was not in the top five stressors. Conclusion: Within the limitations of the study, the second year dental students were not highly stressed. Milder grades of stress cannot be prevented completely. Stress is not always bad as eustress motivates positive functioning of the students