Background & Objectives: Today, stress has become a new disease affecting human civilization. People need new solutions to deal with this condition, and what makes people different in dealing with problems is their coping styles. High school students are one of the most vulnerable groups in society. The adolescents' assessments of the quality of life and their perceived realities differ from their parents and society. Besides, this gap is widening and deepening every day. It is up to people to feel that their quality of life is good and that their perceptions of each other are not the same. Today, students face new academic challenges, including academic stress. Previous studies have not directly examined a model for the mediating role of academic stress in the relationship between quality of life and coping styles in students. Thus, the present study investigates the mediating role of educational stress in the relationship between quality of life and stress coping styles in secondary high school students.
Methods: The research is a descriptive–correlational study and uses structural equation modeling. The statistical population comprised all secondary high school students in Kerman City, Iran, during the academic 2017–2018. To determine the sample size, we used Krejcie and Morgan's table (1970) and selected 367 students by multistage cluster sampling. The inclusion criteria were secondary high school female students and willingness to participate in this research. The exclusion criterion was returning the incomplete questionnaires. The study data were collected using Educational Stress Questionnaire (Sun et al., 2011), The World Health Organization Quality of Life Questionnaire (WHOQOL) (WHO, 1998), and the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (Endler & Parker, 1990). The obtained data were analyzed by descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and structural equation modeling in SPSS 23 and Amos 24 software. The significance level was set at 0.05.
Results: Results showed that quality of life had a direct and significant effect on stress coping styles of problem–oriented (p<0.001, β=0.623), emotion–oriented (p<0.001, β=–0.386), and avoidance (p=0.005, β=0.301). Also, quality of life had a direct and significant effect on academic stress (p<0.001, β=–0.341). Besides, quality of life indirectly and mediated by academic stress had significant effects on coping styles of problem–oriented (p=0.005, β=0.051), emotion–oriented (p<0.001, β=–0.297) and avoidance (p<0.001, β=–0.265,). In addition, the research model fit well with the collected data (χ²/df=1.65, CFI=0.97, GFI=0.94, NFI=0.93, AGFI=0.92, RMSEA=0.03).
Conclusion: According to the study results, quality of life with the mediating role of academic stress can create a good model to predict coping styles in secondary high school students. To overcome students' stress, factors affecting their quality of life, especially academic stress, should be considered.