Abstract
The first intelligent COVID-19 lockdown resulted in radical changes within the tertiary educational system within the Netherlands. These changes posed new challenges for university students and many social welfare agencies have warned that it could have adverse effects on the social wellbeing (SWB) of university students. Students may lack the necessary social study-related resources (peer- and lecturer support) (SSR) necessary to aid them in coping with the new demands that the lockdown may bring. As such, the present study aimed to investigate the trajectory patterns, rate of change and longitudinal associations between SSR and SWB of 175 Dutch students before and during the COVID-19 lockdown. A piecewise latent growth modelling approach was employed to sample students’ experiences over three months. Participants to complete a battery of psychometric assessments for five weeks before the COVID-19 lockdown was implemented, followed by two directly after and a month follow-up. The results were paradoxical and contradicting to initial expectations. Where SSR showed a linear rate of decline before- and significant growth trajectory during the lockdown, SWB remained moderate and stable. Further, initial levels and growth trajectories between SSR and SWB were only associated before the lockdown.
Highlights
The diverse biological, genetic, and epidemiological attributes of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2 or ‘COVID-19’) has made it one of the most contagious diseases in modern history (Wilder-Smith et al 2020)
This paper is the first to look at how trajectories of social wellbeing and social student resources change before and during the COVID-19 outbreak in the Netherlands
Positive relationships were found between all factors (p < 0.05) with effect sizes ranging from small (r = 0.14) to large (r = 0.83)
Summary
The diverse biological, genetic, and epidemiological attributes of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2 or ‘COVID-19’) has made it one of the most contagious diseases in modern history (Wilder-Smith et al 2020). With the absence of validated treatment strategies or vaccines, the only effective public health intervention to manage transmittable diseases is to control person-to-person infections through social distancing, isolation, quarantine, and community containment procedures (Cetron and Simone 2004; Masters et al 2020; Wilder-Smith and Freedman 2020; Wilder-Smith et al 2020) These nonpharmaceutical interventions’ (NPIs) focus on a suite measures to both mitigate possibilities of infection and suppress the spread of the disease to prevent deaths, health care system overloads, and to reduce incidence (Chowdhury et al 2020). Citizens were still permitted to move around freely and meet with social contacts under the condition that they maintained a 1.5 m distance (Chorus et al 2020; de Haas et al 2020)
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