Undergraduate Students’ Mental, Emotional and Coping Responses to an Online Environment during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Jamaica: A Mixed Methods Study

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives and livelihoods of people around the world. This study aimed to investigate the mental health and coping response related to the sudden switch to online teaching and learning (OTL) during the pandemic. We also explored the strategies they employed to cope with the online environment’s emotional stress. Participants were recruited from the undergraduate student population of a prominent university in Kingston, Jamaica. In this study, an exploratory sequential mixed methods research design was utilized where findings of the qualitative phase were used to develop a survey instrument for online administration. Focus group discussions (FGDs) with eighty-six students provided qualitative data, and 465 students answered questions on the study topic in the survey. Findings from the sample survey represented those in the qualitative data. In the FGDs, students expressed feelings of anxiety, depression and loneliness about the OTL during the pandemic. In the survey, most students experienced anxiety (87 per cent), some depression symptoms (sadness/crying, 74 per cent), and loneliness (72.1 per cent). In particular, they were generally unaware of the university’s counselling service, which was not dissimilar in the survey findings (54 per cent). There were some statistical associations among mental and emotional outcomes and coping methods between categories: anxiety and missing classes (Φ = 0.264), anxiety and social media (Φ = 0.228), sadness and missing classes (Φ = 0.219) and loneliness and missing classes (Φ = 0.218). The community of practice-learning theory helped to explain these findings. We concluded that these findings highlighted a need for greater awareness of and access to psycho-social services to assist students in managing their mental health, especially during a pandemic. This study contributes to the mixed methods literature as an example of how quantitative findings can help generalize qualitative results to a study sample.