The relationship between mindful attention awareness and interpersonal communication conflict tendency and coping with stress

This study was conducted to examine the relationship between mindful attention awareness of university students and their interpersonal communication conflict tendency and coping with stress. A quantitative approach was adopted in the study. The study was conducted with 455 university students studying at various departments of Sivas Cumhuriyet University Faculty of Education (321= females, 134=males). The study data were collected using a "Personal Information Form", which was used to obtain information about participants' socio-demographic characteristics, the "Mindful Attention Awareness Scale", which was developed by Brown and Ryan (2003), to obtain information about their mindful attention awareness levels, the "Conflict Tendency Scale", which was developed by Dökmen (1986), to obtain information about their interpersonal communication conflict tendency, and the "Coping with Stress Scale", which was developed by Türküm (2002), to obtain information about their stress-coping levels. IBM SPSS 25.0 software package was used to analyze the research data. Descriptive statistics of the study were presented using minimum, maximum, frequency, mean, percentage, and standard deviation values. In inferential statistics, "independent samples t-test" was used for comparing groups of two, and "ANOVA" was used in three or more group comparisons to examine the levels of stress-coping, mindful attention awareness, and interpersonal communication conflict tendency in the context of socio-demographic variables. The Pearson correlation coefficient was used to determine the correlation between the variables of the study. According to the findings, the interpersonal communication conflict tendency variable yielded a significant difference according to gender. Accordingly, the mean scores of females were significantly higher than those of males. The mindful attention awareness levels of participants whose mothers had high school and above education were higher than those whose mothers had primary education or below. The variables of the study did not show a significant difference according to the field, school year, and father's education. It was found that there was a low, statistically significant negative correlation between students' interpersonal communication conflict tendency levels and their stress-coping (r = -0.169; p<0.01) and mindful attention awareness (r= -0.416; p<0.01) levels and a low, statistically significant positive correlation between their mindful attention awareness and stress-coping (r=0.166; p<0.01) levels. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to determine whether interpersonal communication conflict tendency levels and stress-coping levels predicted mindful attention awareness levels. Interpersonal communication conflict tendency and coping with stress were found to predict mindful attention awareness by 18%. As a result of the research, it was determined that as the level of mindful attention awareness level of the person increased, the level of interpersonal communication conflict tendency decreased and the stress-coping agency increased.