Relationships among stress, resilience, and incivility in undergraduate nursing students and faculty during the COVID-19 pandemic: Policy implications for nurse leaders

BACKGROUND: Developing successful targeted interventions to reduce incivility for undergraduate nursing students and educators will require understanding the differences in their unique experiences. Although resilience may act as protective buffer against stressors, little is known about the relationships between stress, resilience, and perceptions of the frequency of incivility in the academic environment. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to compare relationships among and differences between perceptions of incivility frequency and self-reported stress and resilience levels in undergraduate nursing students and faculty during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHOD: A comparative descriptive and correlational research design was utilized. An online survey was used to collect data from undergraduate nursing students and faculty (n = 710) at one public university. RESULTS: Students were significantly more stressed and less resilient than faculty. Faculty reported significantly greater low and high-level student and low-level faculty incivility behaviors than students. CONCLUSION: Understanding student and faculty perceptions of uncivil behavior frequency occurring at the intersection of high stress and moderate resilience levels is key to the creation of targeted interventions and policy development.