Students' resilience in focus for EUniWell project
The project "RESSTUD - Resilience for Students" has received funding in EUniWell's fourth seed funding call. Amanda Heath, psychologist and PhD student at the Department of Psychology, is participating from Linnaeus University.
It is quite common for students to experience problems with their mental health when they move to a university to start their studies. It can, for example, be about depression and anxiety, or that they are not eating and drinking properly.
“The pandemic has made it worse”, says Amanda. “The effects of the pandemic and of lock downs in various countries have had a major impact on students. As newcomers to a university campus, students have in many cases become isolated there, without social networks during remote teaching modes. Many students have also had reduced income, as they often work part-time at jobs that disappeared during the pandemic.”
“Overall, there have been many challenges for the students in Europe during the pandemic. The early research has shown that it has affected their well-being on top of the stresses of adjusting to life at university.”
Co-researcher Martin Kreienkamp at the University of Cologne had developed a training course on resilience and wellness, and the project has taken it as a starting point to further improve and digitize it.
“The education obviously is well anchored in literature and research on well-being and positive psychology”, Amanda points out.
The training gives students knowledge and the opportunity to test various exercises and tools for how they can, for example, manage and reduce their stress and strengthen their optimism and self-acceptance.
“The training is about boosting resilience – or how I as a person can bounce back and find ways to deal with what is happening around me. Our hope is that the students can find tools that suit them and that they can continue to use for a longer period of time and that boost personal well-being.”
The training will be given in digital form in the spring. It runs over four weeks, with a number of lecture sessions where the students work at their own pace and in addition there will be four live sessions with a trainer.
The project group hopes to get around 50 students per university to participate in the training. The universities participating in the project are those in Birmingham, Cologne, Nantes and Linnaeus University.
How come you are involved in the project?
“I was contacted by Martin Kreienkamp at the University of Cologne and his background is in well-being research.”, says Amanda. “He asked if I was interested and if I wanted to apply my expertise as an organizational psychologist. I was happy to get involved.”
How has it been to collaborate from an EUniWell perspective?
“Good. It was EUniWell that brought us together in the project, we didn't know each other before. The project has given me a wider and more interdisciplinary network”, Amanda Heath concludes.
Read more about the project "RESSTUD - Resilience for Students" on the EUniWell website.
See all projects that received funding through EUniWell's 4th call seed funding call.