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Taking the Pulse:
Stress, Coping, and Resilience in Student Staff
THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC has presented unique challenges and stressors that
are testing the resilience of residential life staff in significant ways. Like many
colleges and universities, this campus of study provided almost exclusively
remote instruction during the 2020-21 academic year while providing housing
for approximately 30% of the undergraduate population. In 2021-22, this campus
was near the residential capacity while providing mostly in-person instruction.
Even with a 97% vaccination rate for students, monitoring the safety and wellness
of residents created unique stressors for both professional and paraprofessional
staff. The varied impacts of the pandemic brought constant change, and the
results of such change were no more apparent than in the 24/7 environments of
the residential community. This article explores the depth and breadth of issues
related to the stress, coping, and resilience of live-in student staff and identifies
variables that contributed to their well-being. Using a mixed methods approach,
a comparison was made between student hall staff and the rest of the campus
population on self-reported mental health concerns. These data were used to
create changes in practice to improve the paraprofessional experience, such as
professional staff assuming more in-person responsibilities and making mental
health support more readily accessible to paraprofessional staff.
T
he many impacts from the recent COVID-19 pandemic have been well documented
in news reports (Casselman, 2022; Ivory et al., 2022; Tingley, 2022).
For higher education, the impact on college students has been particularly acute
(Donaldson, 2022; Fischer, 2020), since they have struggled to find and build community
and to possess the necessary technology tools to effectively navigate their virtual
classrooms, while suffering from mental health and wellness challenges, like stress,
anxiety, and loneliness (Ezarik, 2022). For these reasons, higher education institutions
continue to search for ways to support and encourage their students, helping them to
feel that they matter and that the institution will support their health and well-being.
Lewin (1936) perceived individual behavior as a function of both the person and
the environment, B = f (P, E). Based on this model, the environmental influences (E in
this equation) of the pandemic impacted the behavior (B in the equation) of students
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