Investigating how students’ learning environment, social and physical well-being influence their resilience and feelings of depression and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

In response to COVID-19 pandemic-related social restrictions, university students have reported being more depressed, lonelier, and less resilient, potentially affected by changes within the academic system. The present study investigates how students’ social and physical well-being affect their psychological well-being and additionally explores the role of the learning environment. To this end, we analyzed secondary data collected during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic with multiple regression and explorative analysis. Results indicate that social resources – in particular, the quality rather than the quantity – positively influenced students’ psychological well-being. Engaging in physical exercise appeared beneficial, whereas consuming drugs remained a contradictory predictor. Emergency remote teaching appeared a main factor that predicted students’ well-being. This powerful effect masked the positive influence the teachers could have had. Given the profound changes in the academic system due to persistent social distancing requirements, these insights could provide valuable input when designing a healthy post-pandemic learning environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Student well-being
• resilience
• COVID-19 learning environment
• depression
• loneliness

Acknowledgements

This study is part of the COVID-19 International Student Well-Being Study (C19 ISWS). C19 ISWS is the result of a study design, study protocol and questionnaire developed by a team of the University of Antwerp, Belgium (prof. Sarah Van de Velde, dr. Veerle Buffel and prof. Edwin Wouters; see Van de Velde et al., 2021).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Contrary to the pre-registration, we excluded social and physical well-being as outcome variables for the sub-hypotheses.

2 https://osf.io/zcmpq

3 The supplementary material comprises the SPSS syntax used, further additional information on the sample, the scales used and their internal consistencies, and more in-depth analyses that were excluded due to space limitations.