Comparative study of academic stress in Business Management engineering students during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic represented a radical change in the educational modality, consequently, it had repercussions in different aspects for the students, generating as a consequence stress, which for the present work is studied from the congoscitivist approach. The objective was to identify the level of academic stress during the Covid-19 pandemic in Business Management Engineering students in the state of Hidalgo in order to make a comparative study. By means of an empirical, quantitative, descriptive, cross-sectional, non-experimental and explanatory study, the survey was used as a method of data collection, adapting the SISCO SV Academic Stress Inventory questionnaire adapted to the context of Covid-19, which was applied to a sample of 344 Business Management Engineering students from Hidalgo, Mexico. The results indicate that in both institutions more than 71% of the student body presented a high level of academic stress, also, it is identified that the greatest stressor is the overload of tasks and work, as well as the performance of written evaluations, practices, application work, projects, while the stress symptoms manifested by the students are anxiety, anguish, despair and sleep disorder. As for coping strategies, to a greater extent they deal with academic stress by concentrating on resolving the situation that worries them. Finally, by means of the Mann-Whitney U non-parametric test for independent samples, the hypothesis establishing the existence of differences in the levels of academic stress of both study groups was tested; this difference is not significant.