📄 social_science

The Mediating Role of Psychological Resilience in the Effect of Academic Stress on Attitudes Toward Sport Among University Students

This cross-sectional study of 391 university students reveals that psychological resilience partially mediates the relationship between academic stress and attitudes toward sport, suggesting that resilience helps explain how academic pressures influence students' sporting orientations.

Original authors: MEHMET AYDOĞAN, ENDER ÖZBEK, HAKAN KIRKBİR

Published 2026-07-31

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CC BY 4.0

Original authors: MEHMET AYDOĞAN, ENDER ÖZBEK, HAKAN KIRKBİR

Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ✨ This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer

Imagine the university campus as a giant, high-stakes video game level. The "boss battles" are exams, the "grind" is the mountain of homework, and the "energy bar" is your mental stamina. In this world, academic stress is the heavy backpack you're forced to carry; it's the feeling of being overwhelmed by expectations and deadlines. On the other side, attitude toward sport is your desire to run, jump, or play—your willingness to engage in physical activity as a way to feel good and stay healthy. But there's a third character in this story: psychological resilience. Think of resilience not as a superpower that makes you immune to pain, but as a magical "recovery potion" or a springy trampoline. It's the ability to bounce back after a tough hit, to keep your balance when the game gets hard, and to get back to your normal self after a stressful moment. Scientists have long wondered: Does the heavy backpack of stress crush your desire to play, or does it somehow make you want to run faster? And does that "recovery potion" of resilience help you keep playing even when the pressure is on?

This paper, written by researchers from universities in Turkey, dives right into that question. They wanted to see if psychological resilience acts as a "middleman" or a bridge between the stress of school and how much students actually like sports. They gathered data from 391 university students—about 70% of whom were women and 30% men, ranging from 18 to over 26 years old. The students filled out surveys about how stressed they felt by their studies, how resilient they felt they were, and how positive their attitudes were toward sports.

Here is what the researchers found, and it's a bit of a twist on what you might expect. First, they discovered that the more academic stress a student felt, the more positive their attitude toward sport became. It sounds like a paradox, right? Usually, we think stress makes us want to curl up on the couch. But in this group, the students who felt the most pressure also seemed to have the strongest desire to be active. The researchers also found that higher stress was linked to higher resilience scores. It's as if the students who faced the biggest "boss battles" were the ones who had trained their "recovery potions" the most.

But here is the real magic trick: resilience was the key that connected the stress to the sport. The study showed that stress didn't just magically make people like sports; it worked through resilience. When students faced high stress, it seemed to boost their resilience (their ability to bounce back), and that boosted resilience, in turn, made them have a more positive attitude toward sports. The math showed that this "bounce-back" effect explained a big chunk of the relationship. However, it wasn't the whole story. Even after accounting for resilience, stress still had a direct link to a positive attitude toward sports. So, resilience is a partial hero, not the only one.

The researchers are careful to tell us that because they took a snapshot of all this data at just one moment in time, they can't say for sure that stress caused the resilience or that resilience caused the love for sports. It's like seeing a photo of a runner mid-stride; you know they are running, but you can't tell exactly how they started the race just from the picture. Still, the numbers were clear: the link between stress, resilience, and sports attitudes was strong and statistically significant. The study suggests that for university students, the pressure of school might actually be a weird kind of fuel that, when processed through a resilient mindset, turns into a desire to move and play. It hints that if universities want to help students stay active, they might need to look at how students handle stress and build their "recovery potions" alongside their study schedules.

Technical Summary: The Mediating Role of Psychological Resilience in the Effect of Academic Stress on Attitudes Toward Sport Among University Students

Problem Statement
University students frequently encounter academic stress stemming from performance expectations, coursework loads, examination pressure, and future uncertainty. While existing literature establishes links between academic stress and negative psychological outcomes (e.g., depression, anxiety), the relationship between academic stress and health-related lifestyle orientations, specifically attitudes toward sport, remains under-explored. Furthermore, the mechanisms explaining how academic stress influences these attitudes are not fully understood. This study addresses the gap in testing whether psychological resilience—the capacity to maintain functioning and recover under stress—serves as an explanatory variable (mediator) in the association between academic stress and attitudes toward sport.

Methodology

Design: A cross-sectional correlational study employing a quantitative research approach.
Participants: The sample consisted of 391 university students in Türkiye, selected via convenience sampling. The demographic breakdown included 69.8% women and 30.2% men, with age groups ranging from 18 to over 26 years.
Instruments:
- Educational Stress Scale (ESS): A 16-item, five-factor scale (pressure from study, workload, worry about grades, self-expectation, despondency) adapted for Turkish use. In this study, the total scale Cronbach's alpha was 0.889.
- Sport-Oriented Attitude Scale (SOAS): A 25-item, three-factor scale (interest in sport, living with sport, active sport participation). The total scale Cronbach's alpha was 0.953.
- Brief Resilience Scale (BRS): A 6-item scale measuring the ability to bounce back after stress. The Cronbach's alpha in this study was 0.691.
Procedure: Data were collected via personal information forms and the aforementioned scales. Ethical approval was obtained from Dicle University.
Analysis: Data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 27 and the PROCESS macro 5.0 (Model 4). Analyses included descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, linear regression, and bootstrap-based mediation analysis with 5,000 resamples to determine the significance of indirect effects.

Key Results

Correlations: All three primary variables showed positive and significant correlations:
- Academic stress and psychological resilience ( $r = 0.434, p < 0.001$ ).
- Academic stress and attitude toward sport ( $r = 0.371, p < 0.001$ ).
- Psychological resilience and attitude toward sport ( $r = 0.446, p < 0.001$ ).
Regression and Mediation:
- Academic stress significantly predicted psychological resilience ( $B = 0.164, \beta = 0.434, p < 0.001$ ).
- The total effect of academic stress on attitude toward sport was significant ( $B = 0.660, \beta = 0.371, p < 0.001$ ).
- In the full mediation model, both the direct effect of academic stress on attitude toward sport ( $B = 0.389, p < 0.001$ ) and the effect of psychological resilience ( $B = 1.649, p < 0.001$ ) remained significant.
- Indirect Effect: The indirect effect of academic stress on attitude toward sport via psychological resilience was significant ( $B = 0.271, 95\% \text{ BootCI } [0.161, 0.390]$ ).
Mediation Type: Because the direct effect remained significant after including the mediator, the study concluded that psychological resilience acts as a partial mediator.

Significance and Claims
The paper claims that psychological resilience partially explains the relationship between academic stress and attitudes toward sport. Specifically, higher academic stress is associated with higher psychological resilience scores, which in turn are associated with more positive attitudes toward sport. The authors interpret the positive association between stress and resilience not as stress being beneficial, but as an indication that students are mobilizing psychological resources to cope with academic demands.

The study emphasizes that these findings are not causal due to the cross-sectional design. However, the authors suggest that examining academic stress and psychological resilience together provides applicable evidence for university support programs. They propose that integrating stress management, resilience skill-building, and physical activity participation within student support frameworks (e.g., counseling and sport units) could be beneficial for fostering positive attitudes toward sport among university students.

Limitations Noted by Authors
The authors explicitly acknowledge several limitations:

The cross-sectional design precludes causal inference.
Convenience sampling limits the generalizability of findings to all university students.
Self-report data may be subject to social desirability and common method bias.
The sample was gender-imbalanced (more women than men).
The Brief Resilience Scale showed a borderline reliability coefficient ( $\alpha = 0.691$ ) in this specific sample.

Technical Summary: The Mediating Role of Psychological Resilience in the Effect of Academic Stress on Attitudes Toward Sport Among University Students

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