Enhancing Emotional and Motivational Development to Support Well-being and Retention in Diverse University Students

Summary

Higher education is crucial for young adults in their intake of knowledge and skills to further their careers and reach their potentials. However, going through college is not necessarily an easy path. The purpose of this study is to enhance university students' well-being and educational experience by examining factors associated with stress and well-being.

The investigator plans to recruit eighty participants from a large public university in the US to provide survey data and saliva samples at two waves during the data collection semester (beginning and end of the semester). Survey data will include demographic information and help gauge psychosocial factors related to stress and well-being. Saliva will be tested for two biomarkers each wave of data collection, cortisol (sampling three times a day for diurnal patterns for two consecutive days) and c-reactive protein, which indicate physiological stress/immune responses. Additionally, participants be randomly assigned to an intervention (n = 40) or control group (n = 40), where the intervention group will undertake a brief intervention focused on motivation and emotion regulation circa mid-semester and the control group will receive a placebo goal-setting short training. The investigator aims to examine whether intervention efforts can enhance end-of-semester psychological and physiological well-being, and particularly, whether students from diverse backgrounds (e.g., first-generation, low-income, and/or BIPOC) can benefit from the intervention.

The investigator will use advanced quantitative data analysis (using Mplus v.8, in a structural equation modeling framework) to examine intervention efficacy and group differences. The investigator hypothesizes that those receiving the intervention will display a healthier profile at the end of the semester compared to their control group counterparts; and the investigator hypothesize students from diverse backgrounds will have significantly improved results from the intervention.

The study will allow a better understanding to crucial steps towards exploring how to improve the well-being, higher-education pipeline, and retention of students with diverse backgrounds, providing insight on how each student's university experience can be improved.

Conditions

• Healthy

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Contextualized Wish-Outcome-Obstacle-Plan (WOOP) intervention

This intervention will ask students to identify socio-culturally integrated academic or personal goals, so that students may be able to better strategize obstacle-overcoming to attain their future academic aspirations and modulate negative emotions or environments and associated physiological responses.

BEHAVIORAL

Placebo

The placebo control group will receive a 5- to 10-minute online goal-setting video tutorial and confirm that they have completed it by filling out an online check-list.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Arizona

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Katherine C Cheng, PhD · Assistant Research Professor

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

OTHER

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2022-01-18

Primary Completion

2024-12-17

Completion

2025-04-08

Countries

• United States

Study Locations