The Effect of Airline Service Major Students’ Online Practical Classrelated Stress on College Maladjustment and Dropout Intention during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Moderated Mediation Model of Resilience

Abstract

Introduction. Airline service major students have experienced very high online practical class-related stress during the COVID-19 pandemic, because students in online classes have not had the ability to practice service skills and customer service techniques that would previously have been learned in face-to-face classes (e.g., service role-playing, food and beverage role-playing, etc.). Thus, online practical class-related stress has led to high college life maladjustment and dropout intention among students. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify the relationships among online practical class-related stress, college life maladjustment, and dropout intention, and to examine the effect of resilience as a moderated mediation that weakens the negative impact between college life maladjustment and dropout intention. Samples and methods. The participants in this study were 314 airline service major students from three universities in South Korea. Data were collected from sophomore (40.1%), junior (30.9%), and senior (29%) students in South Korea. This study used SPSS Win.21.0 statistics programs to conduct the frequency test, exploratory analysis, and reliability and correlation tests. For the moderated mediation analysis, ‘Model 14 of PROCESS macro ver.4.0’ was used as the statistical method. Results. First, dropout intention had positive correlations with both online practical class-related stress (r = .518, p<.01) and college life maladjustment (r = .325, p<.01), while it had a negative correlation with resilience (r = -.494, p < .01). Second, resilience was found to have conditional indirect effects on the relationship between online practical class-related stress and dropout intention through college life maladjustment that were significant (p < .01) when the resilience values were 4.0 (.0379~.1200) and 4.5 (.0244~.0740), respectively. Therefore, the moderated mediation effect of resilience was verified. Practical significance. This study found that airline service major students with high resilience have decreased dropout intention. The results of this study indicate that students’ resilience should be fostered and reinforced with the goal of reducing or overcoming students’ college life maladjustment and dropout intention during the COVID-19 pandemic.