The Relationship Between Personality Types, Stress and, Coping Mechanisms in Prelicensure Nursing Students

Understanding personality types is essential to thrive in any environment.  Students in the nursing major face a multitude of stressors such as heavy course workloads, long hours, a steep learning curve, the need to learn multiple and sometimes complicated psychomotor skills and perform them before an instructor, and complex interpersonal relationships. The authors explored whether personality type influences each student’s ability to cope with those stressors and adopt more effective forms of stress management.

Comprehension of personality type is beneficial to both students and educators.  This understanding may give the learner insight into how to use learning strategies and methods of stress management that appeal to individuals with a particular personality type (or profile).  Additionally, understanding of these interrelationships can be a useful tool providing insight for educators as to more effective forms of teaching and communication likely to resonate with individual learners.

The relationship between stress and personality type is an important area to explore.  Stress in nursing students is a known phenomenon which has the potential to negatively affect their ability to learn new concepts in class, perform well in the clinical setting, and do well on exams. 

Nursing students in their first year of a baccalaureate degree nursing program (juniors) were surveyed to determine personality types, perceived stress, and coping strategies.  The instruments used to collect the desired information were the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (TS II), and the COPE Inventory.  These instruments have been extensively used for studies assessing personality, coping, and stress.  These instruments are considered reliable and valid.  Data from these surveys were analyzed to determine what relationships exist between personality type and stressors, and which coping strategies each personality type used.  This poster will present these findings and offer recommendations for both nursing students and faculty to help students understand and use stress management strategies based on personality type.