Stress and Interpersonal Relationships in Medical Students During Public Health Emergencies: A Network Analysis

With the growing demand for medical services worldwide, especially during public health emergencies, medical students, as a special group of future medical workers, are important for the development of health services, and they therefore experience more stress than ordinary college students do. The mental health of medical students plays a vital role in their training, and interpersonal relationships are an important factor affecting their stress levels.

This study aims to investigate the network structure of stress and interpersonal relationships among Chinese medical students and identify bridge variables to prevent and relieve this stress.

A self-report measurement taken from the Sociodemographic Questionnaire, Stress Scale for College Students and Interpersonal Relationship Synthetic Diagnosis Test was administered to 322 Chinese medical students from January to April 2022. Network analysis was used to determine the network structure, and the bridge expected influence (BEI) was identified as the bridge variable.

A total of 6.83% of the medical students experienced high levels of stress, and 31.06% of the medical students experienced various degrees of interpersonal distress. The edges across the community associated with stress and interpersonal relationships were all positive. The edges between S1 "personal hassle" and R3 "dealing with people", S2 "academic hassle" and R2 "socializing", and S3 "negative life event" and R4 "dating someone of the opposite sex" were the strongest. S1 "personal hassle" had the greatest BEI of the stress community (0.44), and R3 "dealing with people" had the greatest BEI of the interpersonal relationship community (0.19).

This study used network analysis to investigate the relationship between stress and interpersonal relationships in Chinese medical students at the component level for the first time and highlight that the critical bridge variables "personal hassle" and "dealing with people" may contribute to preventing and relieving stress in Chinese medical students.