Associations among resilience, coping strategies, and anxiety in undergraduate nursing students: A mediation model

Abstract background Over the years, anxiety has remained a research hotspot for nursing scholars. Th research aimed at understand the current situation of anxiety, psychological resilience, and coping styles among undergraduate nursing students throughout the middle and late stages of their internship, as well as to uncover the correlations among these three factors, so as to provide a reference for research in nursing psychology and nursing education. Methods This study employ a cross-sectional research and quantitative research method. Through convenient sampling, 185 students from a certain school in Guangdong Province were selected as the research subjects from November 2024 to January 2025. The Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS), the Simplified Version of the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC-10), and the Simplified Coping Style Questionnaire (SCSQ) were used for revealing the current status of anxiety, resiliency, and the tendency of coping style selection during the internship of students, and to explore the correlations among anxiety, resilience, and coping styles. Results Subjects got an average standard score of SAS was 45.90 ± 10.30, and the anxious positive rate was 22.1%. The overall average score of psychological resilience was 22.4 ± 5.9, and the average scores of two coping styles dimension were 2.65 ± 0.05 (Positive) and 2.21 ± 0.04 (Negative) respectively. There were significant correlations one another with those. Multiple linear regression reported that resilience, negative coping styles were able to affect anxiety in some degree. Negative coping style didn’t played a completely mediating role between the anxiety and resilience. Conclusion This research outcome showed that enhancing the psychological resilience not only can effectively reduce negative coping styles, but alleviate the anxiety of undergraduate nursing students.