A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal

The relationship between academic vs. family/personal role conflict and Malaysian students’ psychological wellbeing during COVID-19 lockdown




AuthorsBadri Siti Khadijah Zainal, Wan Mohd Yunus Wan Mohd Azam

PublisherTaylor & Francis

Publication year2022

JournalJournal of Further and Higher Education

Volume46

Issue1

First page 76

Last page88

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2021.1884210

Web address https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2021.1884210


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.



Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 18:11