The Relationship Between Academic Year and Social Anxiety Among Nursing Students: The Mediating Effect of Ego-Resilience

This descriptive survey study examined the relationship between academic year and social anxiety among nursing students and investigated the mediating effect of ego-resilience.Participants were 310 nursing students from four universities located in G Metropolitan City and J Province, South Korea, and data were collected using structured questionnaires.Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-tests, analysis of variance (ANOVA), Pearson's correlation analysis, and PROCESS macro Model 4. The significance of indirect effects was tested using 5,000 bootstrap resamples.Mean scores for social anxiety and ego-resilience were 3.01±0.65and 3.72±0.48,respectively, and academic year did not significantly differ for either variable.Social anxiety was significantly negatively correlated with ego-resilience (r =-.450, p < .001).In the multicategorical mediation analysis using second-year students as the reference group, third-year students had significantly lower ego-resilience than secondyear students (B=-.179,p=.016), and ego-resilience was significantly negatively associated with social anxiety (B=-.623,p<.001).The relative indirect effect of being a third-year student versus a secondyear student on social anxiety through ego-resilience was significant (B=.111, 95% CI [.019, .202]).In contrast, the relative direct and total effects were not significant.The relative indirect effects for firstand fourth-year students compared with second-year students were also not significant.These findings suggest that, in understanding social anxiety among nursing students, individual internal adaptive resources such as ego-resilience should be considered in addition to differences in academic year.However, because these findings were based on an exploratory analysis of specific contrasts between academic years, further in-depth and replication studies are needed to clarify the relationships between academic year, social anxiety, and ego-resilience.