Date of Award
December 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Richard Wise
Abstract
Graduate school is a highly stressful experience for many psychology students. Accordingly, graduate psychology programs need to identify and minimize unnecessary sources of stress on their students. Despite the importance of this topic, there is little research on factors that increase psychology graduate students’ stress. The present study determined how a student’s financial difficulties, quality of their social support, quality of their faculty support, number of adverse experiences they had in their program, the impact of a student’s negative experience in their program; and the population size of the location of their program affect a student’s mental health, perceived progress in their graduate program, their stress level, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms. A survey was disseminated to directors of APA-accredited clinical and counseling graduate programs, ultimately reaching 125 clinical and counseling graduate students. Through the application of ordinal logistic regression and binomial logistic regression analyses, the present study suggests that lack of faculty support is the most important factor that increases graduate student’s stress. Additional research is needed to identify other factors that increase graduate student stress, how stress can be minimized, and how students can most effectively cope with stress. These changes would not only benefit graduate students but also their current and future clients.
Recommended Citation
Lang, Kathryn, "Psychology Graduate Student Experiences, Social Support, And Mental Health" (2024). Theses and Dissertations. 6542.
https://commons.und.edu/theses/6542
