Subjective mental well-being among higher education students in Finland during the first wave of COVID-19

Abstract

Aims: Increased mental health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic have become a major concern among young adults. Our aim was to understand which COVID-19-related questions predicted mental well-being during the outbreak. Methods: Two cross-sectional datasets were used. The primary dataset was collected in May 2020 ( n = 1001), during the initial COVID-19 outbreak, and the secondary in April 2019 ( n = 10866), before the pandemic. Mental well-being was assessed with the Short Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale. Relationships between mental well-being and COVID-19-related questions were investigated with lasso regression. As an exploratory analysis, two-way ANOVAs were used to compare mental well-being before and during the outbreak. Results: Higher levels of mental well-being were associated with lower levels of academic stress and COVID-19-related worry, along with a higher satisfaction with the procedures and information provided by the higher education institutions and the government. COVID-19-related symptoms and infections did not have an impact on students’ mental well-being during the outbreak. Small to moderate effect sizes across the time points were detected, indicating an overall decrease in mental well-being across age and gender during the outbreak. Conclusions: COVID-19 had an impact on higher education students’ mental well-being. Higher education institutes may play a crucial role in protecting their students’ well-being during uncertain times.

Digital higher education

“…This section discusses trends in how HEIs are managing and supporting the quality of their digital offerings by reviewing the eight key principles for the QA of digital higher education presented in Section 3.2.4. A list of associated indicators is presented for each principle, based on analysis of the indicators included in five widely used international quality frameworks for digital higher education: the benchmarking tool developed by the Australasian Council on Open, Distance and e-Learning (ACODE) (Sankey and Padró, 2016 [95]), E-xcellence (EADTU, 2016 [96]), DigCopmOrg (Kampylis et al, 2015[18]), EMBED (Goeman, Poelmans and Van Rompaey, 2018 [97]), and Quality Matters (Quality Matters, 2018 [98])). These frameworks were selected as they represent a variety of regions (i.e.…”

“…To supplement existing materials, feedback was also invited from staff and students through a number of surveys and focus groups. Additionally, the ACODE benchmarking framework (Sankey and Padró, 2016 [95]) was completed through a series of workshops with input from a wider group of academic and professional staff. The self-assessment report was then used to form the basis of an external quality review undertaken by a team of selected experts in December 2020.…”

The Imperative of Students and Teachers' Well-Being in Finnish University: A Bibliometric Approach

“…In [10] opinion, lower levels of academic stress, less worry about COVID-19, and regular information from the educational institutions and the government are associated with high levels of mental wellbeing. Another study focused on the Nordic countries and employed landscape drawings of nature to illustrate the promoters of well-being.…”

Exploring the Well-Being of Slovenian and Serbian Sport Science Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic of Summer 2022

“…In this way, these measures necessitated people’s adaptation to new public health and social circumstances. From the perspective of the university student population, these serious measures (such as closed universities, online learning, and isolation physical distance among individuals) resulted in lifestyle changes [ 4 ] and mental health and well-being difficulties [ 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ].…”