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Effects of resilience, social support, and academic self-efficacy, on mental health among Peruvian university students during the pandemic: the mediating role of digital inclusion

Background: Mental health of university students has been impacted during the pandemic, highlighting the importance of understanding its psychosocial determinants. Nevertheless, there has been limited exploration into whether the digital inclusion conditions for remote education could mediate the effects that variables such as resilience, social support, and academic self-efficacy may have on mental health. Considering the above, there is evidence that shows a consistent relationship between resilience, social support and academic self-efficacy on mental health, to the extent that these are psychological variables. On the other hand, digital inclusion, which comprehends a contextual variable, not a psychological one, related to ICT access opportunities and mainly focused on the quality of Internet access, should be analyzed in a differential manner. Results: The results revealed significant levels of extremely severe symptoms of anxiety (36.8%), depression (33.4%) and stress (18.1%) among the participants. A path analysis, which indicated that resilience (β = −0.346), social support (β = −0.189), academic self-efficacy (β = −0.060) and digital inclusion (β = −0.089) had significant impact on students’ General Distress. In addition, digital inclusion plays a partial mediation role with low but significant effect size in the relationship between resilience, social support and self-efficacy with mental health. Conclusion: Mental health of university students during the pandemic shows alarming levels of general or emotional distress. The findings indicate that resilience, social support and self-efficacy protect college students’ mental health by reducing general distress. However, the study shows that when there is a digital divide around internet quality the impact of these factors is affected.

Autor(es):

CASSARETO, Mónica

CHAU, Cecilia

ESPINOSA, Agustin

Año: 2024

Url: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1282281/full#h1