The Effectiveness of Stress Management Training on Perceiving and Coping With Stress and Developing Resilience

Associate degree students studying in the field of health perform their professions in the status of intermediate staff related to health in our country. They are in direct or indirect contact with every segment of the society within the health system. They are also in a multidisciplinary team. This enables them to interact within the team. Therefore, it can be clearly said that the stress they will be in may affect other team members. In previous studies in the literature, it is seen that more studies have been conducted with undergraduate health professional candidates. However, considering that associate degree health students start their professional life at a younger age, it can be thought that they may have more difficulties in coping with the stress that the health sector may cause. This situation can be facilitated by strengthening their psychological resilience. In this study, it can be said that it is important to provide stress management training and measure its effectiveness by taking these factors into consideration. It can be thought that the results will contribute to the importance by filling the gap in the literature. Objective: This study was a pretest-posttest randomised controlled psychoeducational intervention in which the effect of stress management training given to first-year health students on their perceived stress, coping methods and psychological resilience was examined. Research hypotheses H1: Perceived stress post-test scores of first-year health students who received stress management training will be lower than those who did not receive the same training. H2: The post-test scores of the first-year health students who received stress management training will be higher than the post-test scores of the students who did not receive the same training. H3: First-year health students who receive stress management training will have higher psychological resilience post-test scores than students who do not receive the same training. Methods: The study was conducted with 102 health students, 51 intervention and 51 control. Randomly assigned intervention group received stress management training consisting of 7 modules for 7 weeks. No intervention was given to the control group. Data were collected using sociodemographic form, perceived stress scale, stress coping methods scale and short psychological resilience scale. Pre-test and post-tests were administered to both groups.