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PERCEIVED PSYCHOLOGICAL STRESS AND PERSONALITY PROFILES IN DENTAL STUDENTS
Abstract
Little research has been found relating personality characteristics and life events stress, although each entity has been exhaustively studied alone. The interrelation between these two constructs presents an interesting problem, particularly in specific situations known to be acutely stressful in and of themselves. The major purpose of this study was to describe psychological stress in dental students and relate it to their personality traits. The present study identified sources of stress as perceived by dental students and investigated the general proposition that stress was related to and influenced by personality traits of dental students. A secondary purpose of this study was to examine any relationships between selected demographic characteristics and the mean stress score of dental students, and between selected demographic characteristics and the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) personality trait scores. The CPI and the Scale of Stressful Life Events were administered to 153 volunteers from the Dental College at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. The CPI scores were standardized and summed to produce four interrelated scores for each student. The Scale of Stressful Life Events was factored to produce two independent stress scores (professional school and life style) for each student. Both a one-way analysis of variance and a multivariate analysis of variance were computed to assess the effects due to sex, age, and living arrangements. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were computed to determine the interrelationships among the dependent variables. It was found that females had significantly higher total stress than did males and that students living alone also had significantly higher total stress than did students who shared housing. In general, the life style stresses were fairly evenly distributed across all classes, but younger students tended to regard themselves as having higher professional school stress. There was nearly a consensus on twenty stressful professional school events. Some of these stresses were classified as subject to change through university actions, some were classified as subject to change through stress reduction techniques, and some were classified as being under the sole control of the student, not all of which could be changed by individual student action.
Subject Area
Adult education|Continuing education
Recommended Citation
RICHARDS, VICKIE KAY, "PERCEIVED PSYCHOLOGICAL STRESS AND PERSONALITY PROFILES IN DENTAL STUDENTS" (1982). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8227037.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8227037