Abstract
In light of rising concern about the coronavirus pandemic crisis, a growing number of universities across the world have either postponed or canceled all campus and other activities. This posed new challenges for university students. Based on the classification proposed in the Mental Health Continuum model by Keyes, the aims were to estimate university students’ prevalence of mental health during lookdown outbreak, and to examine the associations between mental health and, respectively, academic stress, self-efficacy, satisfaction for degree course, locus of control, COVID-19 risk perception, taking into account the level of information seeking about pandemic. Overall, 1124 Italian university students completed a self-report questionnaire. Data were analyzed using descriptive and correlational analyses. Results showed that 22.3% of participants were flourishing, and levels of mental well-being appeared in line with normative values in young Italian adults; levels of academic stress were not significantly higher than those found in other student samples before the COVID-19 outbreak. Students with high levels of information seeking presented higher levels of well-being and risk perception. Results could be considered useful to realize training pathways, to help the university students to improve their well-being, post-pandemic.
Highlights
Since the end of December 2019 and January 2020, researchers have identified a particular coronavirus responsible for a disease named COVID-19 [1] and, since March 11th, the World Health Organization assessed that COVID-19 could be characterized as a pandemic
Specific aims of the study were to estimate the prevalence of flourishing and languishing among participants and examine the incidence of some academic variables, new media information seeking about COVID-19, internal locus of control and COVID-19 personal and collective risk perceptions in the Mental Health Continuum Model categories
We expected that mental well-being, and its sub dimensions, were negatively correlated with measures of academic stress, and risk perceptions, and positively and significantly correlated with self-efficacy, satisfaction, sense of belonging, information seeking, internal locus of control
Summary
Since the end of December 2019 and January 2020, researchers have identified a particular coronavirus responsible for a disease named COVID-19 [1] and, since March 11th, the World Health Organization assessed that COVID-19 could be characterized as a pandemic. We will employ the Mental Health Continuum model [4], to estimate participants’ well-being and consider the impact of several variables concerning information seeking and personal and collective risk perceptions, along with constructs regarding psychosocial assets in the university context, like sense of belonging, students’ efficacy beliefs, satisfaction for degree course, locus of control, and academic stress. Identifying these factors is critically important, as they inform policies and interventions aimed at protecting students’ well-being, and promote adequate career skills in the era of pandemics, and in the later stages
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