The Role of Self-Leadership Strategies in Coping with Stress Level of Freshmen Students Entered in 2020 at Hawassa University

Abstract

This research scrutinizes the role of self-leadership strategies in coping with stress among freshmen students entered in the 2020 entry at Hawassa University. To achieve the objective, convergent parallel design (QUAN+QUAL) and mixed-methods were employed with pragmatism research paradigms perspectives. Consequently, 362 students from the natural and social science streams were selected by simple random sampling techniques, and 8 lecturers, 12 student class representatives, and 4 counseling office members were taken by purposive sampling techniques. The data was collected through questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and FGD. The analyses of the data were conducted by applying both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics including person correlation and linear regression and qualitative data by using a thematic analysis approach was employed. The results revealed that there was a high level of academic stress, a moderate level of psychological, social, and environmental stress, and a low level of physiological stress among the students. Besides, the students do not effectively practice self-leadership strategies. The relation between self-leadership strategies and stress positively correlated and as a significant predictor of stress is behavior focused strategies were found to have the strongest effect on coping stress followed by other strategies. Thus, if freshmen do not use adequate stress-coping techniques to deal with a negative stressful event, their stress can linger over time, increasing their chance of having serious academic, social, psychological, and environmental difficulties. Thus, structured and integrated self-leadership training is given to students in a continuous and systematic manner, orienting and supporting them through their academic tenure at their institutions and providing freshman-oriented counseling services by counselors through psycho-education approaches to strengthen the habits of self-leadership culture in coping with stress. Moreover, students should construct an effective time management program for studying and pleasure activities during their study years to enhance learning outcomes.