College, Interrupted: Profiles in First-Year College Students Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic Across One Year.

Abstract

First-year college students in the 2019-2020 academic year are at risk of having their mentalhealth, identity work, and college careers derailed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. To assess emerging and evolving impacts of the pandemic on mental health/well-being, identity development, and academic resilience, we collected data from a racially, ethnically, geographically, and economically diverse group of 629 students at 4 universities across the US within weeks of lockdown, and then followed up on these students’ self-reported mental health, identity, and academic resilience three times over the following year. Our findings suggest that: 1) students’ mental health, identity development, and academic resilience were largely negatively impacted compared to pre-pandemic samples; 2) these alterations persisted and, in some cases, worsened as the pandemic wore on; and 3) patterns of change were often worse for students indicating more baseline COVID-related stressors.

Coping in the time of COVID‐19: Mindsets and the stories we tell

“…We asked participants to think about an event that best explains a parenting challenge they had faced using a narrative identity framework (McAdams, 2011). The prompt asked participants to include information such as who was there, when the event occurred, what they thought/felt during the event, why they chose this event, and the meaning they assign to the event (Pasupathi et al, 2020). We planned on extracting themes related to agency, redemption, and contamination, but in the process of coding we found another consistent theme—namely, languishing, which we define as stories that start out negatively and end negatively.…”

“…Participants described a COVID‐19 setback or challenge using the same narrative identity framework as Study 1 except we did not require them to focus on a parenting challenge in this study (McAdams, 2011; Pasupathi et al, 2020). The prompt asked participants to think about and describe an event that best explains the challenges they have faced because of the COVID‐19 pandemic.…”

“…The prompt asked participants to think about and describe an event that best explains the challenges they have faced because of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Like Study 1, they were asked to include information such as who was there, when the event occurred, what they thought/felt during the event, why they chose this event, and the meaning they assign to the event (Pasupathi et al, 2020). For example, participants wrote about effects on their mental health, isolation, online schooling, and changes in their daily schedule due to COVID‐19.…”