Increasing Resilience in Adolescent Nursing Students

Nursing students not only face the same developmental challenges as other college students, but also experience unique stressors that contribute to increased risk for negative outcomes. The intimate nature of patient care, the exposure to workplace adversity, death and dying, and the chaotic nature of healthcare can have cumulative negative effects on students’ health and well-being. Increased resilience could prove useful in helping students confidently face challenges and successfully move forward. The lack of empirical evidence regarding resilience-enhancing interventions with nursing students supports the need for examining the effectiveness of an educational intervention to increase resilience in adolescent baccalaureate nursing students. The purpose of this study was to: (1) determine the effectiveness of an educational intervention delivered via Twitter to increase resilience and sense of support, as well as decrease perceived stress, in a sample of adolescent baccalaureate nursing students, and (2) to describe the personal characteristics of this sample of nursing students. Ahern’s model of adolescent resilience, as adapted from Rew and Horner’s youth resilience framework, was the guiding theoretical model for the study. The study was a multisite experimental repeated measures design with a follow-up email survey. Participants were a sample of 70 randomly assigned junior-level baccalaureate nursing students, ages 19-23, at two state-supported universities in the southeastern United States. Both groups completed three instruments, the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), Sense of Support Scale (SSS), and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) at three times of measurement. Multilevel modeling was used to examine growth trajectories over time. Both groups showed a decline in perceived stress, but the control group demonstrated a greater decrease in scores at follow-up. No statistically significant difference was detected between groups in terms of sense of support. The experimental group demonstrated an increase in resilience from pretest to posttest, but declined at follow-up. Despite these unexpected findings, results of the email survey indicate the intervention was beneficial to some students. Strengths of the study include the innovative intervention using Twitter, the use of repeated measures, the use of multilevel modeling to analyze longitudinal data, and the first known use of Ahern’s model as a guiding framework

How can students-as-partners work address challenges to student, faculty, and staff mental health and well-being?

Mental health has emerged as a critical area of attention in higher education, and educational research over the last 15 years has focused increasingly on emotions and wellbeing at all stages of education (Hill et al., 2021). While definitions of well-being vary, most are premised on “good quality of life” (Nair et al., 2018, p. 69). Within the last few years, we have experienced an intersection of several forces that undermine or threaten good quality of life. These include the uncertainties prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic (Hews et al., 2022, U.S. Surgeon General, n.d.), climate change (Charlson et al., 2021), racism and social injustices (Williams & Etkins, 2021), the cost-of-living crisis (Montacute, 2023), and the lack of motivation and higher incidence of mental health issues associated with growing concerns about job prospects and income (Chowdhury et al., 2022). This fifth iteration of Voices from the Field explores some of the ways in which students-as-partners work can address challenges to the mental health and well-being of students, faculty, and staff. This focus, proposed by members of the IJSaP Editorial Board, both responds to the intersecting realities named above and remains true to the goal of this section of the journal, which is to offer a venue for a wide range of contributors to address important questions around and aspects of students-as-partners work without going through the intensive submission, peer-review, and revision processes. The prompt we included in the call for this iteration of Voices was: “In what ways can students-as-partners work address challenges to the mental health and well-being of students, staff, and faculty posed by the current realities in the wider world (socio-political, environmental, economic, etc.) that affect higher education?