Association between Students' Inattentiveness to Study and their Psychological Conditions during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

While the COVID-19 pandemic has adverse impacts on the state of mental health of the individuals, no attention has been paid so far in the academia whether there is an association between students’ inattentiveness to study and their psychological conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, the study was intended to find out the association between students’ inattentiveness to study and their psychological conditions during this pandemic. Primary data for this study were collected from a total of 157 samples chosen from 18 academic departments of the Noakhali Science and Technology University (NSTU), Bangladesh on the basis of snow-ball sampling. The study reveals that most of the respondents are much inattentive to study during the COVID-19 pandemic and they are much anxious, depressed, tensed, restless, bored and frightened and thereby their mental health and well-being has been affected. The study opines that there is a strong positive association between students’ inattentiveness to study and their psychological conditions which involve anxiety, depression, tension, restlessness, boredom and fear/panic. The study indicates that the association between students’ inattentiveness to study and their psychological conditions is statistically significant. Finally, the study suggests that the Government and the authority concerned should undertake proper measures to mitigate the adverse psychological conditions of the students of the NSTU by means of motivations and psychosocial counselling and thereby keeping up their attentiveness to study during the pandemic or any critical situation.  As such, there is a crying need to establish a psychosocial counselling centre or an educational counselling centre in all universities of Bangladesh including the NSTU.