Resilience and Emotional Intelligence among Students in Karachi, Pakistan: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Students find it difficult to deal with life experiences and their challenges can cause stress and adverse effects. Prior research has also supported that clinical practice environments can lead to anxiety and stress among students (Ahmad & Anwar, 2018). A cross-sectional study was designed to explore resilience and emotional intelligence (EI) among university students in three fields: psychology, medical, and nursing, as they go through an extensive training regimen during their academic sessions. The Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) (Smith et al., 2008) and the Schutte Self Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT) (Schutte et al., 1998) were used to determine resilience and EI respectively in the sample, which comprised of 301 university students. It was found that there is no significant relationship between emotional intelligence and resilience. However, managing own emotions (subscale of EI) was only found to be weakly correlated (r꞊ .173, p<.05) with resilience. Moreover, a significant difference was found in the emotional intelligence of medical, nursing, and psychology students while an insignificant difference was found for resilience. The findings revealed that higher EI was found among medical students as compared to Nursing students. Moreover, Psychology students had greater EI than nursing students. Advocating a revision in the academic curriculum for developing skills like EI and resilience can facilitate a healthy coping of dealing with life and workplace challenges in their clinical practice.