Investigation of Stress Management Among University Students Using the Document Analysis Method

In the 21st century, stress is an almost inevitable part of life. Many stressful situations are experienced by today’s students. These situations can vary depending on personal, academic, and work situations. It is important to recognise and manage these situations. The ability to manage stress is also a 21st-century skill, one of the soft skills valued by today’s employers. We have created a course on stress management in collaboration between the Netherlands, Hungary, and Malta. Our research aimed to understand Generation Z students’ views and stress management techniques in engineering, business, and IT. These insights will enable us to develop additional methods to improve these important soft skills. Furthermore, we investigated the influence of certain background factors on the selected stress-coping strategies. It is important to clarify what we mean by stress before determining what tools are available to deal with stressful situations. We should consider what factors may trigger stress, what short- and long-term consequences are likely, and what positive consequences may arise. Various stressful situations can be associated with a variety of negative feelings, so we have analysed these feelings. Awareness of these feelings is useful for their control and management. The study was based on the analysis of texts written by 59 university students in a course on stress management, to draw conclusions about how they perceive stress, what factors influence how they perceive it, how they behave in stressful situations and how well they can identify their feelings in these situations. Various links between gender, academic performance and stress management are explored in the study.