ADDRESSING EMOTIONAL AND RESILIENCE INEQUALITY AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS VIA AN ONLINE ACADEMIC RESILIENCE COURSE

Abstract

"Transitioning from high-school to university challenges young adults to develop greater self-reliance in order to fulfill their needs, engage in relationships, plus adhere to general -self-care, and other healthy behaviors. High-intensity emotions due to difficulties or failure to achieve these goals may result in poor decision-making and impaired self-care (disordered eating, substance abuse, other unfavorable behaviors). This presentation will describe the effects of taking a 13-modules of computerized resilience academic course with a mandatory 1-2 personal assignments for each module. The course effectiveness was assessed via a controlled trial comparing the 124 students that chose to take this elective course and 150 socio-demographic matched controls that did not choose to take this course. At baseline, participants in the research group demonstrated statistical significance lower values compared to the comparison group in the following measures: self-resilience (measured by the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale-CD_RISK), self-esteem (measured by Rosenberg Scale), global scores of emotional statuses (measured by depression, anxiety, and pressure scores -Dass-21) and body esteem (measured by the Body Esteem Scale -BES). Thus, all the baseline values were entered as covariates to the ANCOVA Repeated Measures analysis to assess the differences between the intervention and the comparison group along the 4 assessments time: baseline, course termination (after 3.5 months), 3 & 6 months, post-termination. Results revealed a statistically significant superiority to the intervention group in the improvement of all these variables with small effect sizes. At the 6 month’s post course termination, the mean scores of participants in the intervention group reached equality in most variables compared to the mean scores of the comparison group. In some variables they even demonstrated higher scores. The mediating effect of the year that the course was taken and the ethnicity (minorities vs. others) were not statistically significant. Nevertheless, the improvement in minorities’ resilience and self-esteem was double compared to the improvement among all others. The improvement in self resilience and self-esteem among first year students was 1.5 times higher than that of the 2nd and 3rd years students. The promising results indicates that emotional and resilience inequality may be addressed via an academic self-learning online-course."