Optimizing college health promotion in the digital age: Comparing perceived well-being, and health behaviors, health education needs and preferences between college students enrolled in fully online versus campus-based programss.

Michelle M Burcin,Jody O Early,Shelley N Armstrong,Holly Godwin

doi:10.15171/hpp.2019.37

Abstract

Background: There is little published about non-traditional and online college students’ health and well-being. College health services must evolve to address the needs of this growing population. The purpose of this study was to explore risk factors, perceived well-being, health behaviors, and health education preferences of US college students enrolled in a fully online academic programs compared to a national sample of college students enrolled in campus based programs. Methods: This cross-sectional study included a volunteer sample of 961 college students enrolled in two large, U.S. accredited online universities. Participants completed an online survey that included questions and sub scales from the National College Health Assessment (NCHA, IIb). Responses on survey items from student learning online were compared to an equal sample of college students enrolled in non-online programs, randomly drawn from the NCHA IIb national data set (n = 961). Frequencies on survey items were calculated and mean scores of subset measures for online students were compared against those from the NCHA data set using two tailed z-test scores and independent sample t-tests with alpha at 0.05. Results: Online students reported significantly (P ≤ 0.05) higher percentages of chronic illnesses, psychiatric conditions, mobility disabilities, deafness/hearing loss, speech/language disorders,cigarette use, obesity, sedentary activity, and depression than the NCHA national sample. Implication for Practice: Health professionals and leaders who work in higher education must consider the shifting landscape and demographics in higher education in order to develop more tailored, innovative digital health promotion approaches that effectively reach the growing population of online, commuter, and older learners.

Highlights

There is little published about non-traditional and online college students’ health and well-being
The purpose of this study was to explore risk factors, perceived well-being, health behaviors, and health education preferences between US college students enrolled in a fully online academic programs compared to a national sample of college students enrolled in campusbased programs
Of the 961 fully online students who completed the survey, the mean age was 40.2 years compared to 22.6 years for the NCHA group

Summary

Introduction

There is little published about non-traditional and online college students’ health and well-being. Responses on survey items from student learning online were compared to an equal sample of college students enrolled in non-online programs, randomly drawn from the NCHA IIb national data set (n = 961). A few studies have made conclusions about the online learning environment and the students’ being at higher risk of sedentary lifestyles, cigarette smoking, and depression due to social isolation.[2,3,4] Rohrer et al found that nearly a quarter of online student respondents were smokers and may favor the online learning environment because studying at home permits them to smoke.[3] a recent exploratory study suggested that being an online student was not a risk factor for poor health.[5] The results of these studies are inconsistent and contain many limitations, the use of non-random sampling which may make the sample not representative of the online student population.[3,5] In addition, when online students are surveyed using a snowball sampling method,[3] it is not possible to benchmark them to students nationwide

Objectives

Methods

Results