ORIGINAL RESEARCH Personal characteristics and styles of coping with stress of nursing students of a university in Turkey

Objective: University studentship and the university life itself have the potential to create worry and stress. Nursing education is a hard and stressful process. The purpose of this study is to identify nursing students ’ ways of coping with stress. Methods: The study was designed as a descriptive and cross-sectional. Target population of this study was all the students who were enrolled in a nursing school of a university located in Turkey. The data were collected “Personal Information Form”, developed by the researchers in light of the related literature, with a view to identifying socio-demographic features of the participants and “Ways of Coping Questionnaire ” with a view to finding out the ways of coping with stress. Results: The participants of the study were 467 students. An evaluation of the WoCQ sub-scale mean scores of the nursing students in the present study showed that they got 21.15 ± 3.92 from the self-confident style, 14.03 ± 2.87 from the optimistic style, and 12.04 ± 2.97 from the seeking social support. An evaluation of the WoCQ sub-scale mean scores of the nursing students according to grade level shows that first graders got 12.13 ± 2.19 from the submissive style (p =.037), who were pleased with the school tended to be more self-confident and who could not communicate with the opposite sex tended to have a more helpless style (p =.004) in coping with stress. Conclusions: Results of the present study indicate that various factors play a role in nursing students ’ ways of coping with stress and they seem to cope with stress effectively