First‐year students' psychological resilience and college adjustment: A person‐oriented approach

Abstract

AbstractPrevious research has concentrated on psychological resilience as a holistic structure and has found that resilience positively affects college adjustment. However, it is suggested by existing literature that college students' resilience is a multidimensional construct. Furthermore, there is limited understanding regarding the categorizations of resilience among first‐year college students and its influence on their college adjustment. This study aimed to identify the profiles of first‐year college students' resilience, including individual powers and supportive powers, and explore the effects of varying resilience profiles on first‐year students' college adjustment. A valid sample of 771 first‐year college students from 28 Chinese colleges participated in this survey. The online surveys were conducted through Wenjuanxing platform. Data were analyzed using latent profile analysis to identify first‐year college students' different resilience profile and examine the relationships with college adjustment. Four groups featuring unique resilient characteristics were discovered: well‐resilient students, students with low individual power but high supportive power, students with high individual power but low supportive power, and mal‐resilient students with low individual power and low supportive power. Well‐resilient first‐year students reported the best condition of college adjustment compared to the other groups, which supports the conservation of resources (COR) theory. These results provide insight into first‐year college students' particular and heterogeneous circumstances at the beginning of the college experience. They also refined the COR theory by identifying individual‐specific relationships between psychological resilience and college adjustment.