Introduction: University students encounter multiple academic, psychosocial, and environmental stressors during their transition to higher education. Nursing students may be particularly vulnerable because of concurrent academic and clinical demands. Objective: To identify the relationships among perceived stress, social support, and psychological anxiety among nursing students. Methods: A cross-sectional quantitative study was conducted among first- to fourth-year nursing students at the International University of Ulaanbaatar. After excluding 16 incomplete questionnaires, 119 valid responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics, reliability testing, and correlation analysis in SPSS version 26.
Participants had a mean age of 22.39±5.60 years, and 86.6% were female. The mean item scores were 3.15±0.40 for perceived stress, 4.11±0.78 for social support, and 2.35±0.39 for total anxiety. Perceived stress was positively correlated with total anxiety (r=.310, p=.001), personal anxiety (r=.307, p=.001), and situational anxiety (r=.261, p=.004), and negatively correlated with age (r=-.213, p=.020). Social support was not significantly correlated with perceived stress (r=.015, p=.872) but was negatively correlated with total anxiety (r=-.253, p=.005) and personal anxiety (r=-.334, p<.001). Conclusion Students’ perceived stress was associated with anxiety. Higher social support was related to lower anxiety, although a direct relationship between social support and perceived stress was not observed in this sample.