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The Impact of COVID-19 on Appalachian Undergraduate Students' Well-being

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to explore the impact of COVID-19 on undergraduate students’ well-being and the inter-relationships of emotional resilience, physical health, perceived stress, anxiety, quality of life, and perceived social support of undergraduate college students in the Appalachian region during COVID.
Aim: The inter-relatedness of the six well-being variables was assessed in a convenience sample (N = 1203) of undergraduate students at an academic institution in the Appalachian region to answer the research question: what is the inter-relationship of undergraduate students’ levels of emotional resilience, physical health, perceived stress, anxiety, quality of life, and perceived social support during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive design was used to delineate the inter-relationship of areas of well-being. The researcher received approval from the university’s IRB. Participants completed demographic questions, five measurement instruments related to five of the variables, and three physical-health-related items from the Infectious Disease Measurement tool. The survey was published using the online survey platform Qualtrics. SPSS version 28 was used to perform descriptive statistics on the six well-being variable and the correlations between them. A one-way ANOVA test was used to determine the variance between levels of study and between age groups.
Results: There were significant statistical differences between participants’ levels of study in the 4-year programs and the following four areas: emotional resilience, perceived stress, quality of life, and perceived social support.
Conclusions: This study reveals that students’ emotional resilience and perceived social support are instrumental in promoting students’ mental and physical health.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ETSU/oai:dc.etsu.edu:es-conf-1096
Date23 April 2023
CreatorsHarnois-Church, Patty
PublisherDigital Commons @ East Tennessee State University
Source SetsEast Tennessee State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
SourceEpsilon Sigma at-Large Research Conference

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