A study on stress level and coping strategies among undergraduates

This research is aimed to investigate the stress level and coping strategies among the undergraduates. 86 final year Cognitive Science students from a Malaysian public university participated in this research. This research employed a cross-sectional design and data was analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics to address the research objectives. The instruments used in this study is the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and the Adolescent Coping Scale (ACS). Findings from this research showed that majority of the university students are experiencing moderate to high level of stress. Besides that, this research also found that there is a significant relationship between stress level and coping strategies among undergraduates, there is no significant relationship between stress level and gender among undergraduates and there is no significant relationship between stress level and ethnicity among undergraduates. Results also indicated that majority of the respondents prefer ‘Reference to Others Coping’ and ‘Productive Coping’ strategies. Improvements such as increasing sample size and using different methods of data collection should be employed in future studies to obtain more accurate results