PERCEIVED SOURCES OF PSYCHOLOGICAL STRESS IN POST-GRADUATE ORTHODONTIC STUDENTS IN INDIA: A MULTICENTER SURVEY

The aim of this multicenter survey was to identify the sources of perceived psychological stress in the post-graduate students of Orthodontics and to analyze the influence of age, gender and the year of study on these stressors. 251 post-graduate orthodontic students from 24 dental schools across India anonymously completed a 61 item self-administered questionnaire. The relevant descriptive statistics were computed to summarize the obtained data. The Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA were used for analyzing the inter-group differences based on the gender and year of study respectively. Regression analyses were applied to evaluate the demographic variables as predictors of the degree of perceived stress. The results indicated that dependencies on alcohol, drugs etc., limitations of financial resources, politics and psychological games played by the faculty, fully loaded day, and forced postponement of engagement or marriage were the first five highly stressful factors for the students. Factors related to the personal life of the student were the more common among the top few stressors. In general, the gender of the student or the year of study did not make any significant difference in the nature and degree of perceived stress. None of the demographic variables evaluated in the study were predictive of the overall extent of perceived stress in the student.