Resilience as a coping strategy for reducing departure intentions of accounting students

This study evaluates the influence of resilience as a potential coping strategy to help reduce student departure from the accounting major. We collected data from 443 accounting majors at four geographically disbursed U.S. universities using a battery of psychometric instruments. With these data, we analyzed the relations between role stressors, psychological health, burnout, and departure intentions, and assessed the extent to which individual resilience levels served as a positive influence by enhancing health, and diminishing burnout and departure intentions. We found sources of role stress to have significant negative associations with psychological health, and significant positive associations with academic burnout (direct), and departure intentions (indirect). However, resilience counteracted those associations through its direct positive association with psychological health, and direct negative association with burnout. Resilience also had a significant indirect negative association with departure intentions through its direct associations with psychological health (positive) and burnout (negative).