The development of the Veterinary Medical Stressors Inventory: The identification of perceived stressors and their relationship to personality traits and selected demographic characteristics among veterinary medical students

A review of the literature found little research on veterinary medical students and the stress of the Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine professional program. Thus, a need was recognized for identifying the events that the veterinary medical students perceived as stressful, measuring the stress that the students perceived, and for analyzing the relationship between stress and selected demographics and personality traits.;The main purposes of this study were to develop an inventory which would identify and describe the impact of the stress as perceived by the four classes of veterinary medical students, to use this information to modify the inventory, and to discover the relationship of stress to the students' personality traits.;A secondary purpose of this study was to discover the relationship between the perceived stress of the students and their selected demographic characteristics, to determine which students might be experiencing the most stress. In addition, a tertiary purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between the selected demographic characteristics and the personality traits of the students as measured by the Personal Orientation Inventory (POI).;The Veterinary Medical Stressors Inventory (VMSI) was developed for this study. With the VMSI, the POI was administered to 314 students at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The VMSI was found to be both a reliable and valid inventory.;Fifteen hypotheses were tested with analysis of variance and post hoc comparison of the means. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were computed to describe the interrelationships between the variables.;Top ten stressful events for all of the students and by classes were identified. Significant relationships were found.;The importance of understanding the stress of the veterinary medical students in a profession program is crucial for the utilization of appropriate interventions by mental health professionals.