ACADEMIC STRESS AND ITS MULTIDIMENSIONAL IMPACT AMONG UNDERGRADUATE HEALTHCARE STUDENTS: A STATISTICAL AND CLUSTER-BASED APPROACH

Abstract

Background: Academic stress has a significant impact on the well-being and academic success of healthcare students, yet its multidimensional nature remains poorly understood. Healthcare students face unique pressures beyond typical academic demands, requiring a comprehensive investigation of stress patterns and their relationship with performance outcomes.

Methods: This cross-sectional study examined 492 undergraduate healthcare students using a structured questionnaire adapted from the Medical Student Stressor Questionnaire. We analyzed five stress domains—academic-related, teacher-student interactions, interpersonal challenges, teaching-learning difficulties, and social pressures—through descriptive statistics, predictive modeling (linear regression and decision trees), and K-means clustering techniques to identify distinct stress profiles.

Results: Academic-related stressors dominated, with the highest mean score (1.71, SD = 0.95), and female students reported consistently higher stress across all domains (differences ranging from 0.11 to 0.33 points, p < 0.001). Despite the prevalence of stress, predictive models demonstrated poor performance in forecasting academic outcomes, explaining only 2.1% of the variance in CGPA (R² = 0.021). K-means clustering successfully identified three distinct student profiles: low-stress (33.3%), moderate-stress (33.3%), and high-stress (33.3%) groups. Remarkably, academic performance remained similar across clusters despite significant differences in stress, illustrating a "stress paradox."

Conclusion: Academic stress among healthcare students is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, defying simple predictive relationships with academic performance. The identification of distinct stress profiles and persistent gender differences provides crucial insights for developing targeted, personalized support strategies rather than universal interventions. These findings have important implications for curriculum design, student support services, and mental health interventions in healthcare education, emphasizing the need for profile-based approaches to student well-being.