Effect of dental environment stressors and coping mechanisms on perceived stress in postgraduate dental students

Abstract

Aim and objective: To investigate the effect of dental environment stressors and coping mechanisms on perceived stress in postgraduate dental students. Materials and methods: This cross-sectional study enrolled 250 postgraduate students from four dental colleges. Modified dental environment stress (DES) questionnaire was used to study the dental environment-related stressors, perceived stress score (PSS) to measure the extent of stress perception, and brief COPE (BC) scale to measure the use of various coping strategies deployed to combat stress. An independent T-test was used to determine the associations of these measures with gender and marital status and one-way ANOVA for associations with year of study. Hierarchical regression was used to determine the effect of demographic factors, career-related psychological background, health-related habits, DES, and BC score on PSS. Results: “Synopsis, thesis, library dissertation” and “lack of adequate infrastructure” were reported as the highest stressors by the postgraduate students. Only 4.8% of respondents perceived low stress, while 65.2% perceived high stress. A high correlation between the DES score and PSS was observed. Active coping, acceptance, and positive reframing were the most commonly utilized coping strategies. Planning and use of emotional support were the only coping strategies that were significant negative predictors of PSS. Problem-focused coping strategies had a positive, but non-significant correlation with PSS, while emotion-focused coping strategies had a significant negative correlation with PSS. Conclusion: Postgraduate dental environment causes a high-stress perception in students and reactive coping strategies have only a limited role in reducing stress perception.