The Resilience Journal: Exploring the Potential of Journal Interventions to Promote Resilience in University Students

Abstract

Given the prevalence of mental health issues among university students, they must be regarded as a vulnerable population. Resilience interventions offer one potential means of strengthening students’ capacity to overcome academic challenges and external threats. This is all the more urgent in light of the additional difficulties caused by the current COVID-19 pandemic, such as the demands of remote learning. The present study is a first step toward designing and evaluating an appropriate dynamic resilience intervention for students. The design of the Resilience Journal intervention draws on insights from expressive writing and positive writing research and focuses on reflection on daily challenges. In this online intervention, 100 business school students (66% female, Mage = 23.74) at a German university were randomly assigned to two groups and completed two different versions of the Resilience Journal for 5 days. The two versions focused, respectively on broadening attention to challenges and priming attention to mastered challenges. In a pre-post design, two resilience measures and one measure of life satisfaction were used to assess intervention outcomes. Additionally, a newly developed rating scale was used for daily monitoring of dynamic resilience. While both groups showed a significant increase in resilience as measured by the Brief Resilience Scale, that increase could not be attributed directly to the intervention, as there were no group differences, and the design did not include a control group. The other resilience and life satisfaction measures showed no significant change. This first implementation confirms the potential of the Resilience Journal and indicates directions for the development of dynamic resilience interventions and measures in future studies. To further study the potential of such a positive psychology intervention, future research necessitates the inclusion of control groups.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal studies of the antecedents and consequences of wellbeing among university students

“…Further, despite recent advances, much mental illness still goes untreated, so awareness campaigns and screening programmes might help to bridge this gap. Physical health and resilience also offered positive semipartial correlations with prospective wellbeing, and there is emerging evidence supporting interventions for resilience [159][160][161].…”

Entrepreneurial Resilience: A Case Study on University Students

“…Other studies on Spanish university students show similar results with levels close to 60% in high resilience and 14% with strong resilience, although, on the contrary, they do show low levels of resilience at 30% [ 99 ]. Studies in Italy [ 100 ], Germany [ 101 ] and India [ 102 ] show fluctuating levels of resilience in emerging adulthood during the university stage. This explains the emergence of qualitative and mixed research trying to understand how resilience develops and consolidates itself in adulthood at university [ 103 , 104 ].…”

Psychometric Properties of the Brief Resilience Scale Among Alternative Sexuality Community Members

“…The BRS (Smith et al, 2008) is a six-item measure that contains both positively (three items) and negatively (three items) worded statements regarding the ability to “bounce back.” The BRS is one of the most widely used resilience tools in the literature (Windle et al, 2011), used to assess the impact of resilience interventions (e.g., Lohner & Aprea, 2021) and mental and physical health promotion (e.g., Gloria & Steinhardt, 2016; Schnarrs et al, 2020). In the original development article, across both student and chronically ill samples, principal component analyses indicated a one-factor structure to the BRS.…”