Resilience profiles and disaster preparedness in nursing and midwifery students: Linking educational preferences and behavioral intentions

Frequent global disasters threaten health. Resilience is a key factor influencing the disaster preparedness of nursing and midwifery students, who are future reserves for disaster response. This cross-sectional study surveyed 681 undergraduate nursing and midwifery students, assessing resilience, coping style, interpersonal competence, emergency prevention competence, negative life events, and disaster preparedness. Latent profile analysis revealed three distinct resilience profiles. The High Resilience – Resilient Growth (Preparedness-oriented) group comprised only 7.05%. Most students (51.10%) were in the Moderate Resilience – Experiential Growth (Adaptive coping) group, and 41.85% belonged to the Low Resilience – Cognitive Anchored (At-risk) group. Students in the high-resilience group usually had stronger protective factors, like positive coping, interpersonal competence, and emergency prevention competence. They also reported far fewer risk factors overall, including fewer negative life events. The profiles' ordinal structure justified using ordinal logistic regression to identify factors of profile membership. Given the wide variation in resilience, schools must replace one-size-fits-all programs with interventions tailored to each profile's strengths and needs. This person-centered approach enables precise strategies. These findings contribute to disaster theory by highlighting a shift toward classification-based risk governance, and suggest a potential link between individual resilience and health system robustness. • Nursing and midwifery students exhibit three distinct resilience profiles: High Resilience – Resilient Growth (Preparedness-oriented), Moderate Resilience – Experiential Growth (Adaptive coping), and Low Resilience – Cognitive Anchored (At-risk). • Positive coping and interpersonal competence represent the core protective factors for resilience. • Negative life events and lower emergency prevention competence are risk factors. • We recommend developing interventions tailored to specific profiles and integrating routine disaster training with Psychological First Aid.