Stressors and coping mechanisms among final year Bachelor of Nursing students / Liyana Nabilah Mahmood, Nur Adibah Syahirah Mohd Yusoff and Nur Nadiah Mohamad Nasir

Final year Bachelor of Nursing students encounter a lot of stressful events that eventually correlates with their coping behaviour and mechanisms. Thenadaptations towards the stressful events, namely examination, tests, clinical assessments and other stressors, both in university and clinical practice area, identify the coping mechanisms they frequently used. The main objective of this study was to ascertain stressors and coping mechanisms among final year Bachelor of Nursing students in a government institution of higher learning. A total of 51 final year Bachelor of Nursing students participated in this cross-sectional descriptive study. Data was collected using the Ways of Coping Questionnaire adapted from Susan Folkman and Richard S. Lazarus. Most of the respondents were of 23 years old (86.3%, n=44), while the rest of them were 24 years old (11.8%, n=6) and 26 years old (2%, n=l). The mean value for age was 23.18 (SD=0.518). The most common stressors in the university were identified as Final Year Project (96.1%) and followed by Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) (94.1%). In addition, the most common stressors experienced by the respondents in clinical practice area were identified as preceptorship posting (88.2%) and followed by excessive tiredness following clinical practice (88.2%). Among the eight types of coping mechanisms commonly used by the final year Bachelor of Nursing students were positive reappraisal (n=23, 45.2%), followed by seeking social support (n=20, 39.2%). Age of the respondents were significantly associated with the confrontive coping mechanism (p<0.008) while living area showed significant negative correlation with confrontive mechanism (p<0.008). Age were also significantly associated with escape-avoidance coping (p<0.008). As a conclusion, the findings will enable academicians to determine which students would be more prone to use maladaptive coping mechanisms that may affect their overall academic performance.