What Type of Social Support Is Important for Student Resilience During COVID-19? A Latent Profile Analysis

Abstract

In the face of the sudden outbreak of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), some students showed resilience in coping with difficulties while some did not. While different types of students showed different levels of resilience, are there significant characteristics among students with similar levels of resilience? In this study, 3,454 students (aged 15–25 years) were surveyed to understand students' perceived social support-coping modes while investigating the demographic characteristics and mental health status of subclasses of different modes. We found that (1) in the two subgroups of students with extremely low and low levels of perceived social support, the source of students' perceived social support did not have a clear orientation; in the two subgroups with moderate and high levels of perceived social support, the most perceived emotional support was from family and friends, while the least perceived support was companionship from teachers, classmates, and relatives, and problems related to the dependability of friends and communication with family. (2) The degree of social support perceived by students is directly proportional to the coping tendency, i.e., as the degree of perceived social support increases, the proportion of students adopting active coping strategies increases while that of students adopting negative coping strategies decreases; thus, we concluded that high levels of emotional support from family and friends can increase students' tendency of adopting positive strategies to cope with difficulties, while problems related to the dependability of friends and communication with family decrease students' tendency of adopting positive coping strategies. (3) Gender had a significant impact on the extremely low and low levels of perceived social support-negative coping tendencies; these subgroups accounted for 34.6% of the total students. Gender showed no significant influence on other subgroups, a school type had no impact on the distribution of the subgroups. (4) The higher the degree of perceived social support, the lower is the degree of students' general anxiety, and the lower is the degree of impact by the COVID-19 pandemic. The subdivision of student groups allows us to design more targeted support programmes for students with different psychological characteristics to help them alleviate stress during the COVID-19 epidemic.

The effect of airline service major students’ employment stress on learned helplessness and employment preparation behavior: a moderated mediation model of resilience

“…Resilience is the ability to rise from adversity [12]. In the educational context, studies have shown that resilience affects students' psychological well-being and positive behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic [12][13][14][15]. Therefore, in this study, resilience, a variable studied in positive psychology, is set as a moderated mediation variable, as research shows that students with strong resilience tend to cope with stressful situations more actively.…”

Relationship between social support, coping strategy against COVID-19, and anxiety among home-quarantined Chinese university students: A path analysis modeling approach

“…A Chinese study sampled on 7143 college-level medical students found a negative association between social support and anxiety (Cao et al, 2020 ). A cross-sectional study of 3454 vocational college students found that perceived social support was negatively correlated with general anxiety as well (Mai et al, 2021 ). Survey from 506 university students in Turkey also justified the negative relationship between social support and quarantine-related anxiety (Yalcin et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Objective support was further categorized into family support and counselor support to highlight the situational nature of social support in COVID-19 pandemic. There is a need for the distinction of the sources of objective support in that Chinese students regarded support from family and friends as the most used support and support from teachers as the least used one (Mai et al, 2021 ). Family support referred to the availability of objective support from family and counselor support tapped the utilization of support from psychological counselors when individual met mental stress.…”

“…To be more specific, a COVID-19 related study in Taiwan found that lower perceived social support was significantly associated with higher active coping (Li et al, 2021a ). Again, Chinese students with high levels of social support from family and friends tended to adopt more positive coping strategies (Mai et al, 2021 ). These studies have proposed the potential mediating role of coping between social support and anxiety in the pandemic context.…”

Socioemotional Resources and Mental Health in Moroccan Adolescents: A Person-Centered Approach

“…Regarding SS, studies focused on person approach profiles have found that SS levels may vary between individuals. In this venue, different subgroups may be distinguished according to their degree of perception of support (Mai et al, 2021). However, Ciarrochi et al (2017) further considered the type of support perceived, such as family support, friends, and teachers.…”