ABSTRACT

The psychological wellbeing of remote-learning university students is becoming an increasing concern for educators in the COVID-19 era, due to the potential risk of conflict between academic and family/personal lives in the unusual environments they must now operate in. To determine how this conflict might influence students’ psychological wellbeing, we asked 1,005 university students in Malaysia to complete two types of work/life conflict measures online; one that measured academic work interfering with family/personal lives vs. another that tapped into family/personal lives interfering with academic work. Results showed that approximately 50% of the participants encountered the first conflict, while close to 40% experienced the latter. More importantly, the results further revealed that an increased experience of the first conflict (i.e. academic work undermining family roles) predicted higher levels of stress, anxiety, depression, social dysfunction and loss of confidence, but not unhappiness, while an increased occurrence of the second type of conflict (i.e. family roles undermining academic work) was associated with elevated stress, anxiety, depression, loss of confidence and unhappiness, but not social dysfunction.

摘要

在 COVID-19 时代，远程学习大学生的心理健康正成为教育工作者日益关注的问题，因为他们现在必须在不寻常的环境中进行学术和家庭/个人生活之间的冲突。确定如何这种冲突可能会影响学生的心理健康，我们要求马来西亚的 1,005 名大学生在线完成两种类型的工作/生活冲突测量；一个衡量学术工作干扰家庭/个人生活，另一个衡量家庭/个人生活干扰学术工作。结果表明，大约 50% 的参与者遇到了第一次冲突，而近 40% 的参与者遇到了后者。更重要的是，结果进一步表明，第一次冲突的经验增加（即