<p dir="ltr">Self-care, the intentional and active cultivation of health and wellbeing, has been found to support favorable outcomes across an array of life domains. In addition to preventing and managing disease, burnout, and vicarious traumatization, self-care can promote health and optimal wellbeing. In some occupations (e.g., nursing, psychology, social work), it is mandated as an ethical imperative to prevent impaired professional functioning and associated deleterious effects on clients, patients, and communities served. Yet even in these fields, graduate students report practicing insufficient self-care, which may contribute to decreased retention rates, student productivity, and student wellbeing. As a population with limited time and access to resources, graduate students may need additional external, institutional, and program support to be able to practice effective self-care. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing lifestyle imbalances present in graduate education and further elucidated the need for systemic self-care support. This study uses a systematized review with thematic analysis to compile studies investigating self-care in graduate student populations, with special attention to studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Themes that arose include benefits of self-care, individual factors predicting greater self-care use, challenges and barriers to self-care use, recommendations to support self-care in graduate students, and graduate student self-care during COVID-19. Implications and recommendations for programs and institutions are discussed.</p><p dir="ltr">To prevent burnout and impaired professional functioning, it is crucial that psychologists practice self-care. Despite its ethical importance, self-care is generally still considered an individual responsibility, and most doctoral trainees in psychology report practicing insufficient self-care. The intensive time and energy demands of doctoral education—combined with other competing responsibilities—may limit opportunities for adequate self-care, which poses negative implications for trainee wellbeing and professional functioning. This study uses qualitative methods to investigate factors in doctoral trainees’ social ecologies that they perceive support and impede their self-care, with the goal of shining light on factors that promote and impede self-care in an increasingly diverse population. Participants identified myriad risk and protective factors; supports and challenges; and coping strategies they perceived as detrimental and beneficial, with many factors identified as beneficial when present and detrimental when absent (or vice versa). The Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems theory (PVEST) was used as a framework to understand these results, which suggest that programs and institutions could do more to combat the harmful effects of white supremacy and toxic productivity on student self-care and wellbeing.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/26192219 |
| Date | 08 July 2024 |
| Creators | Abigail Marie Hoxsey (18980393) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/_b_Graduate_Student_Self-Care_b_/26192219 |
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