Abstract
It is a fact that financial stress impact university students. Given this notion, this research looked at the moderating impact of gender on the adaptive coping mechanism of private university students on their financial stress. The research was a descriptive-correlational design. The study conveniently employed 369 respondents of the primer private university in Ghana (Valley View University), out of a population of 9,000 to answer self-constructed questionnaires with Cronbach Alpha of .806 for adaptive coping mechanism and .845 for financial stress. The data were analyzed descriptively based on the central tendency with SPSS and regression Process v3.2 by Andrew F. Hayes model 1. The study revealed that there was a very high financial stress among private university students in Ghana and they have a high adaptive coping mechanism. The students used emotion-focus than problem-focus coping mechanisms in managing their financial stress. Also, there was a moderate positive significant association between financial stress and adaptive coping mechanism. However, the adaptive coping mechanisms could predict financial stress by 11.65%. There was a significant enhancing moderating effect of gender on adaptive coping mechanisms and financial stress relationship. With time the males' financial stress moderately decrease based on their rate of change to adaptive coping mechanism, while the females have a high increasing coping mechanism in managing their financial stress. The study recommends that an investigation into the outstanding 88.35% of adaptive coping mechanisms which can predict the financial stress of private university students in Ghana.
Highlights
Financial stress negatively affects people’s well-being as it limits the ability to meet one's needs and wants
University students are not exonerated from the claws and effect of financial stress, which negatively influences their academic performance (Chan, Huang & Lassu, 2017).This is because financial stress in the general population is related to the financial stress university students experience in the course of their studies (Vaughn, 2012)
Studies indicate that financial stress is a significant problem for the majority of university students who go through their training with lots of financial stress due to mounting expenses and homelessness (Trombitas, 2012; Vaughn, 2012; Hackman, Lim & Montalto, 2014; Archives of Business Research (ABR)
Summary
Financial stress negatively affects people’s well-being as it limits the ability to meet one's needs and wants. Financial stress has often been found to be associated with an unfavorable outcome, such as depression and anxiety (Ponnet, 2016). A person’s inability to meet his or her financial responsibilities has been linked to unfavorable outcomes across many aspects of human endeavors such as health, well-being, and relationships (Northern, O’Brien, & Goetz, 2010). Grabmeier (2015) indicates that 70 percent of Americans college students face financial stress. Financial stress has been noted as an everyday reality for university students as they experience stressors that stem from the cost of education, borrowing cash for university education, repayments of educational loans, which has a high degree to affect students’ performance in class (Trombitas, 2012)
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