NSF Award
2402691
There is a critical need to understand what predicts healthy psychological adjustment among young adults. Young adults have faced significant stress in recent years—worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, including social isolation from their peers and academic challenges. Scientists must better understand which parts of young adult’s emotional lives have been most impacted by these social stressors, as well as whether young adults from diverse backgrounds were impacted hardest. This project aims to study emotional adjustment in a large and ethnically and geographically diverse sample of young adults from five different universities in North America (CU Boulder, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, Northwestern University and UBC-Vancouver) who have been followed before and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We will administer remote-based longitudinal surveys at 4-year and 5-year follow-up points since they first began the study to better understand their current emotions, psychological health, and sense of social isolation and connection with others. This RAPID project will provide critical knowledge to understand how young adults may be at risk for, or resilient from, emotional difficulties and the important role social connection plays during these formative years of young adulthood. Information gained from this project will inform education-focused programs to support emotional wellness for young adults during stressful times and the college adjustment period.<br/><br/>This project addresses a critical and growing concern regarding the emotional adjustment and academic outcomes of college students from around the world during a global public health emergency surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. This project includes innovative and remote-based survey and experience-sampling approaches to study the emotional experiences, social stressors and psychological health of a large and diverse sample of emerging adults who have been followed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the project enables the ability to conduct two important longitudinal assessments at 4-year and 5-year follow-up time points to an ongoing multi-site study led by the PI and her collaborators across several geographically and demographically diverse universities (the University of Colorado Boulder, University of California Berkeley, University of California Irvine, Northwestern University, and the University of British Columbia Vancouver). As such, this project involves two additional follow-up assessments at a 4-year follow-up point from study entry (Fall 2023) and the initial COVID outbreak (Spring 2024). The project utilizes a feasible and remote-based multi-modal approach including (a) remote-based Qualtrics surveys assessing emotion regulation and mood difficulties and (b) smartphone-based experience technologies assessing daily stressors and emotion experience over a 2-week sampling period. There are three aims: Aim 1 employs a survey-based design to examine longitudinal associations of social isolation with emotion regulation and mood difficulties. Aim 2 utilizes an ecologically valid experience-sampling design to test the bidirectional influence of social stressor dimensions on the variability and level of daily emotion difficulties and mood adjustment over time. Given the strong representation of students from historically marginalized identities (i.e., Latinx/e, Black, and Asian) in this population, Exploratory Aim 3 examines whether the impacts from Aims 1-2 are amplified in marginalized young adults disproportionately impacted by additional systemic and social stressors.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
