How do the relationships among health phenomena explain the nursing students’ quality of life?

Abstract

Background and objective: To know the direct relationships between stress, sleep quality, depressive symptoms, resiliency, and quality of life of nursing students. Less is known about how the simultaneous relationships between these variables may explain the nursing students’ quality of life remains unclear. We assessed how the simultaneous causal relationships among stress, depressive symptoms, sleep quality, and resilience explain the nursing students’ quality of life one year after starting a nursing degree program.

Methods: This was a one-year longitudinal study. Data were gathered with validated tools from first university-year nursing students enrolled in two public Brazilian universities at the beginning (n = 117) and end (n = 100) of March 2016. The latent variable analysis- a complement of the R statistical package- was used to estimate the Structural Equation Modelling.

Results: The final model showed good fitness and residues quality. Stress decreased sleep quality and increased the intensity of the depressive symptoms. Both of these, directly and indirectly, reduced the quality of life. Resiliency decreased stress levels and depressive symptoms and improved sleep quality.

Conclusions: The academic environment has the potential for illnesses, impacting the quality of life. On other hand, resiliency plays a protective role on nursing students by reducing stress and its negative effects. Education institutions need to rethink their curricular elements, promote resilience and create actions to promote students’ health.