Stress, Coping Strategies, and Academic Performance of Dentistry Students
The purpose of the study was to determine dentistry students' stress level and coping mechanisms and their relationship to academic performance. The study used descriptive correlational design and purposive sampling technique. The respondents were 120 Dental Proper students from Adventist University of the Philippines; 75 (63% of which are female and 45 (37% are males. Adapted survey questionnaires that measure the stress variable by Gumarao (2011) and COPE questionnaire by De Leon (2013) for the coping strategies were used. The academic performance was measured by determining the overall GPA of the respondents. The questionnaires were distributed and retrieved. The data were encoded, treated, and analyzed by the statistician. The results show that the respondents have average stress level. Most of the respondents experienced high physical stress, moderately high behavioral stress, and average emotional stress in general. Among the coping strategies, emotion focused coping and problem focused coping were often exhibited by the respondents while avoidant coping was rarely exhibited. In general, the respondents used coping strategies in an average level. The overall Grade Point Average (GPA) of the respondents was good. There is no significant relationship between stress and academic performance but there is a significant negative relationship between avoidant coping strategy used and academic performance implying that the more avoidant coping strategy is used, the lower is the academic performance of the respondents.