A Predictive Relationship between Academic Resilience and Stress of University Students

Abstract

Universities play a critical role in educating students for their successful career. However, in higher educational institutes major focus is given on their academic achievement and psychological factors like academic stress are ignored. The aim of this quantitative study was to investigate predictive relationship between academic resilience and stress of the university students. Convenience sampling technique was used to collect data from 738 northern area university students in Pakistan. Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) having 6 items developed by Smith et al., (2008) was used to measure perceived resilience of university students, freely available on internet for academic research. During data collection respondents were asked to assess themselves on a 6-point Likert scale on both scales. Tools were validated by experts and reliability was established using Cronbach’s alpha (0.813). For data analysis, the gathered information was organized and summarized in Excel. Following that, it was analysed using SPSS version 22. To find the effect of perceived resilience stress of the university students regression model was used. Before analysis assumptions of regression model as given by Field (2013) and Laerd (2018) were considered. Findings of this research revealed that perceived resilience scores had a great significant negative effect on stress of university students. The present study highlighted the influence of psychological constructs resilience on reducing stress of university students which ultimately affect their academic performance. In the light of results of current study, it can be recommended that through workshops, seminars, and orientation sessions how university teachers can be motivated to enhance their capacity for teaching and learning using resilience abilities.