Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
V. International and XXIII. National Congress on Public Health, Ankara, Türkiye, 13 - 18 Aralık 2021, ss.946
Introduction and Aim: The aim of this study is to evaluate the psychological resilience and anxiety levels of academic staff working at our University during the COVID -19 era.
Materials-Methods: Before starting this survey based cross-sectional study, the necessary permission was obtained from the Rectorate, and then approval will be obtained from the Institutional Review Board (Approval number: 2021/2417). Approximately 1000 academic staff working at our university formed the universe of the study. The website ‘’https://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm’’ was used for sample size calculation. When confidence level: 95%, confidence interval: 2.0, and population: 1000 data is entered into the system, the minimum required number of participants is calculated as 706. Participants who worked as academic staff at our university and volunteered to participate in this study were included in the study. Participants who entered insufficient data in the survey were excluded from the study.A questionnaire with 34 questions was prepared, consisting of demographic data, Brief Psychological Resilience Scale (PRS) and Coronavirus Anxiety Scale (CAS). Turkish validity and reliability studies of both scales used in this form were previously performed and internal consistency coefficients for both studies were calculated as 0.830 and 0.832, respectively. The dependent variables were PRS and CAS scales. The independent variables were sociodemographic characteristics, working in the hospital as staff, exposure to COVID-19, and vaccination status. This form was prepared using google form and it was sent to the official e-mail of the academic staff. Chi square test (categorical variables) and Mann-Whitney U test (continuous variables) were used for statistical analysis (SPSS v25.0 software)
Results: A total of 718 academic staff [lecturers (n=127), assistant professor (n=187), associate professors (n=185) and professors (n=219)] with a median age of 45 (range 24 to 67 years, IQR: 13) were included, among which 35.4% were working at hospital, 23.1% were smoker and 24.4% had a diagnosis for a chronic disease. Of the academic staff participating in the study, 488 were male and 230 were female. COVID-19 was diagnosed in 28.4% of the participants, 3.5% were hospätalised, 2.5% was treated in a ward, 0.3% were intubated, 27.3% were given at least one or more medication including antiviral drug, acetyl salicylic acid, steroid or low molecular weight heparin. Among the academic staff, 93.6% were vaccinated (Sinovac=24.7%, Biontech: 41.8%, Both: 27.2%), 48.6% were vaccinated twice (single dose: 6.5%, three dose: 27.9%, four dose: 10.6%). Hesistation for vaccine was present in 42.3% of, however 79.1% stated that they were convinced for protective effect of the vaccines. 72% of the academic staff stated to have read articles about COVID-19 vaccine, 47.6% stated that vaccinisation is required to obligated. Only 50.6% of the academic staff stated that information given about vaccines by the health-care givers are sufficient. 6.5% (n=47) of the academic staff stated to be diagnosed for COVID-19 despite vaccinisation and most of them were vaccined with an inactive vaccine (Sinovac= 28, Biontech= 15, both=4). Mean±SD, PRS and CAS scale points of the academic staff were as follows: 21±4.7 and 1.1±2.2. There was not any statistical significant differences between academic staff with and without COVID-19 in terms of PRS (p=0.642) and CAS (p=0.437) scores.
Conclusion: This study shows that the level of resilience of academic staff is quite strong, and therefore, the anxiety scores associated with the COVID-19 are lower than expected. In our first opinion, the fact that academic staff are both conscious and psychosocially strong has minimized their concerns about COVID-19. In our second opinion, the fact that most of the academic staff live on university campuses is one of the factors that can explain their relatively less influence from this process