STRESS AND COPING STRATEGIES AMONG MEDICAL STUDENTS A CROSS SECTIONAL STUDY

Medical education is considered challenging as medical students have to confront diverse varieties of stress during all study years that affects their physical and psychological health and hinder coping abilities. The present study was aimed to examine stress and coping strategies of medical students studying in a private medical college. It was hypothesized that there is likely to be a relationship among stress and coping strategies and differences may exists in stress regarding gender and year of study. A sample of medical students N=200 was selected randomly from Akhtar Saeed Medical & Dental College Lahore. Age range of participants was18to 26 years (M=21).The Medical Students Stressor Questionnaire MSSQ- 40 (Yusoff, Rahim, 2010) was used to assess Stress of medical students and The Brief Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced COPE-28 (Montel,Albertini, Desnuelle, Spitz, 2012) was used to assess Coping skills adopted by medical students. Pearson product moment correlation analysis was carried out to identify relationships among stress, coping strategy and demographics of medical students. T-Test and ANOVA was performed to explore the differences of study variables and demographics. The findings showed a positive relationship between stress and coping. Results revealed a high stress level in female students as compared to male students. Academic stressor was found to be the most influencing factor whereas Avoidance coping was mostly used by medical students in Akhtar Saeed Medical and Dental College, Lahore. A higher stress rate was observed in 2nd year medical students among all study years. It was concluded that stress has a positive relationship with coping and significant differences were found regarding socio-demographics (gender, year of study). Keywords: Medical Students, Stress, Coping strategies, Brief COPE, MSS