The relationship between academic vs. family/personal role conflict and Malaysian students’ psychological wellbeing during COVID-19 lockdown

ABSTRACT

The psychological wellbeing of remote-learning university students is becoming an increasing concern for educators in the COVID-19 era, due to the potential risk of conflict between academic and family/personal lives in the unusual environments they must now operate in. To determine how this conflict might influence students’ psychological wellbeing, we asked 1,005 university students in Malaysia to complete two types of work/life conflict measures online; one that measured academic work interfering with family/personal lives vs. another that tapped into family/personal lives interfering with academic work. Results showed that approximately 50% of the participants encountered the first conflict, while close to 40% experienced the latter. More importantly, the results further revealed that an increased experience of the first conflict (i.e. academic work undermining family roles) predicted higher levels of stress, anxiety, depression, social dysfunction and loss of confidence, but not unhappiness, while an increased occurrence of the second type of conflict (i.e. family roles undermining academic work) was associated with elevated stress, anxiety, depression, loss of confidence and unhappiness, but not social dysfunction.

KEYWORDS:

• Happiness
• inter-roles conflict
• mental health
• psychological wellbeing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Siti Khadijah Zainal Badri

Dr Siti Khadijah Zainal Badri is an assistant professor at the Division of Applied and Organisational Psychology, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus since 2016. Majored in Industrial and Organisational Psychology, she obtained both her Bachelor and Doctoral Degree from the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor. Siti is an active researcher who has been publishing more than ten academic papers with various reputable publishers since the year 2011 for both regional and international audiences in the areas related to organisational/public health and wellbeing disciplines. Her main research theme at present is on work-life balance related issues concentrating on aspects such as 1) assessing both theoretical and practical framework relating to the existing work-life balance practices in both public and organisational context, 2) identifying factor that can hinder or influences one’s work-life balance in everyday experience and 3) sustaining and promoting good work-life balance policy among Malaysian population. Other of her interests involve various occupational and public health and wellbeings concern such as quality of life, happiness and mental health.

Wan Mohd Azam Wan Mohd Yunus

Dr Wan Mohd Azam Wan Mohd Yunus is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the School of Human Resource Development & Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences & Humanities, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia where he has been an academic faculty member since 2011. Currently he is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Research Center for Child Psychiatry at the University of Turku, Finland. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Clinical Psychology from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, United Kingdom and Master of Clinical Psychology from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. For the past few years, he has published research articles in international journals by reputable publishers. His research interests lie in the area of clinical psychology and digital mental health ranging from theory and applications of the development, implementation and evaluation of technology-mediated psychological assessments and interventions for mental disorders.