Psychological Resilience and Coping Strategies in Stressful Situations among Undergraduate Students in Walaga University, Ethiopia

Abstract

Studying in a university has multifaceted challenges: the stage of development, academic requirements, and social relationships demand a strong psychological resilience and coping strategies. In Ethiopia, psychological resilience and coping strategies in stressful situations among the university students has not been studied. Therefore, the current study aims to examine the psychological resilience and coping strategies in stressful situations among undergraduate students in Wallaga University. Institution-based cross-sectional study was employed from April 01- 30, 2022. Stratified random sampling technique was used to select 398 study participants. Data was collected by structured and self-administered questionnaire using resilience resource scale (RSS) and Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS-21). Data was entered in to Epidata software version 3.1 and exported to SPSS version 26 for cleaning and analysis. Pearson’s correlation and multivariate linear regression were employed to explore the correlation between the predictors and the outcome variable. P-value <0.05 with 95% confidence interval was used to declare the statistical significance. A total of 381 undergraduate students were included in the analysis with response rate of 95.73%. The mean age of the study participants was 21.87 (standard deviation ±1.62) years. The total score on the RRS and CISS ranged from 16 to 60 with the mean score of 49.12 (SD ± 7.06); 95% CI: 48.41-49.83 and from 41 to 105 with the mean score of 76.62 (SD ± 11.22); 95% CI: 75.44-77.81. Resilience has a positive correlation with coping strategy score and its components. Being rural resident (β=-2.042; 95% CI; -3.395 to -0.688), first year (β= -7.0.32; 95% CI; -10.918 to – 3.145), second year (β=-3.082; 95% CI; -4.971 to - 1.193), task-oriented coping (β=1.046, 95 CI;0.455-1.636), emotion-oriented coping (β=1.936; 95 % CI: 1.335-2.537) and avoidance coping (β=2.881; 95% CI: 2.286-3.477) were predictors that were independently correlated with psychological resilience among undergraduate students. The study generally showed a considerable level of psychological resilience and coping strategies among undergraduate students. Psychological resilience and coping strategies were positively correlated. Rural residence and being in junior classes (1st and 2nd years) were negatively correlated while the three components of coping strategies were positively correlated with the psychological resilience of the students. Considering the level of psychological resilience and coping strategies of the junior and rural coming students were strongly recommended.