Association between COVID-19 Pandemic Conditions and Perceived Stress Level among College Students in Saudi Arabia

Aims: To assess the levels of perceived stress among college students in Saudi Arabia after changing the learning protocols because of covid-19 pandemic.

Study Design: This was a cross-sectional study.

Place and Duration of Study: The study was conducted in Saudi Arabia, from May 2020 to October 2021.

Methodology: A cross-sectional survey study that was carried out in Saudi Arabia. A self-administered, pre-designed questionnaire, including Perceived Stress Scale of 10 items was used to measure the stress levels. The participants were selected randomly from different social media users who lived and studied in Saudi Arabian universities. In this study, 10-item questions of the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) was used based on a 5-point Likert scale to score each item (0 = Never 1 = Almost Never 2 = Sometimes 3 = Fairly Often 4 = Very Often).

Results: A total of 2034 students living in Saudi Arabia participated in the study. The results showed that 76.84% of total participants had strong stress, males reported higher score as compared to their Female counterparts. Also, students older than 28 years reported higher level of stress, the students in Qassim region showed highest scores of stress. In addition, excellent academic achievement was strongly associated with high level of stress.

Conclusion: The findings suggest that significant number of students had higher stress levels using the perceived stress scale. Therefore, this cross-sectional study identified a high stress level in COVID-19 crisis among university students in Saudi Arabia.