SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS AND EMIGRATION PLANS AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN SLOVAKIA DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

"Objective: The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between socio-psychological factors such as the perceived economic situation, perceived political situation, well-being, rootedness and emigration plans of university students in Slovakia during the Covid-19 pandemic. Methods: The data for this study were collected through an online survey of university students during the Covid-19 pandemic between November and December 2021. The research sample consisted of 151 (76.2% female) Slovak university students (M=21.8 years, SD=2.5). In order to identify emigration plans, there was one question with 8 answer options. Based on this, the respondents were divided into two groups; those who do not plan to leave Slovakia (76.8%) and those who plan to leave in the long term (23.2%). There was also one item used to measure the perceived economic situation and political situation. The satisfaction with life scale was used to measure well-being while the Rootedness scale consisting of the Desire for Change and Home/Family subscales was used to measure rootedness. As emigration plans was a categorical variable, binary logistic regression was used. The analysis was controlled for gender. Results: A model containing five independent variables (perceived economic situation, perceived political situation, well-being, rootedness - desire for change and home/family dimensions) explained 41.9% of variance in emigration plans during the Covid-19 pandemic, and correctly classified 84.8% of the cases. Only three of these variables made a unique statistically significant contribution to the model. The strongest predictor of emigration plans during the Covid-19 pandemic was perceived economic situation, recording an OR of 2.27. This indicated that students who perceived the economic situation in Slovakia more pessimistically were over 2 times more likely to report an emigration plan. The OR of 1.32 for rootedness – desire for change, indicated that students with a greater desire for change were over 1.32 times more likely to report emigration plans. On the contrary, the OR of 0.81 for rootedness – home/family was less than 1, indicating that students who were more satisfied with their home and family were 0.81 times less likely to report emigration plans. Conclusion: The strongest predictor of emigration plans during a pandemic is perceived economic situation. The dimensions of rootedness, as confirmed by previous studies, are predictors of emigration plans in the pre-pandemic and pandemic period."