University Student Mental Well-Being during COVID-19 Outbreak: What Are the Relationships between Information Seeking, Perceived Risk and Personal Resources Related to the Academic Context?

Abstract

In light of rising concern about the coronavirus pandemic crisis, a growing number of universities across the world have either postponed or canceled all campus and other activities. This posed new challenges for university students. Based on the classification proposed in the Mental Health Continuum model by Keyes, the aims were to estimate university students’ prevalence of mental health during lookdown outbreak, and to examine the associations between mental health and, respectively, academic stress, self-efficacy, satisfaction for degree course, locus of control, COVID-19 risk perception, taking into account the level of information seeking about pandemic. Overall, 1124 Italian university students completed a self-report questionnaire. Data were analyzed using descriptive and correlational analyses. Results showed that 22.3% of participants were flourishing, and levels of mental well-being appeared in line with normative values in young Italian adults; levels of academic stress were not significantly higher than those found in other student samples before the COVID-19 outbreak. Students with high levels of information seeking presented higher levels of well-being and risk perception. Results could be considered useful to realize training pathways, to help the university students to improve their well-being, post-pandemic.