Social support: mediating the emotional intelligence-academic stress link

Introduction: This study examines the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and academic stress among tertiary-level students who continued academic activities remotely during the pandemic and the mediating role of social support (SS) in the relationship. Methods: Using a cross-sectional survey design, 429 students studying business, engineering, social science, and science in Bangladesh provided data via Qualtrics. Using the Structural Equation Modeling in SmartPLS 4 (4.0.8.9), we modeled emotional intelligence as the reflective-formative and social support (support from family, friends, and significant other) and perceived academic stress as the reflective-reflective, second-order constructs. We also conducted a one-way between-groups analysis of variance (ANOVA) to investigate the impact of gender (male and female) and current stage of academic study (Undergraduate year one to…