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demic year, while providing housing for approximately 2,000 students in on-campus
housing. This is approximately 30% of the usual single undergraduate residential life
population. The pandemic resulted in constantly changing campus conditions, which
created several areas of uncertainty. When and how should the institution resume
in-person instruction? What would the testing (and re-testing) requirements be? How
should masking mandates be enforced? Even though campus leadership made decisions
informed by local public health guidelines, the pace of change was challenging for
most, if not all, members of the campus community.
Even with a nearly 97% vaccination rate for students (due largely to a system-wide
vaccination mandate), monitoring the safety and wellness of the residential population
created unique and unprecedented stressors for both professional and paraprofessional
staff. In a 24/7 environment like a residence hall, such stressors are greatly amplified.
Residential life staff struggled with issues of resilience and coping and reported
negative impacts that could be described as vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue
(Figley, 1982). This milieu of uncertainty created a situation whereby residential life
staff began to question how to best balance their roles as helper, supporter, programmer,
and policy enforcer with their own personal needs and struggles, and they turned
to the residential life leadership team and the division of student affairs to express their
concerns and request support.
This article will explore the depth and breadth of issues related to the stressors,
coping, and resilience of live-in student staff and will identify the themes and variables
that contribute to their well-being. Using a series of " pulse surveys " administered
by the institution during the 2020-21 school year to all students, the current
study will compare the results for hall staff (resident assistants and theme program
assistants) with those for the general campus population on self-reported mental
health concerns such as depression and anxiety. Follow-up focus groups with hall
staff were conducted to help inform new strategies and practices for improving the
residential life staff experience.
The key questions of our study are as follows:
1. Is there a significant difference in self-reported mental health concerns between
hall staff and the general undergraduate student population?
2. What tools, resources, and strategies do residential life staff utilize to not only cope
with stressful conditions but also enhance their well-being?
METHODS
Grounded in a mixed methodology, this study used existing data to explore the research
questions posed. Specifically, the use of an exploratory mixed methods research design
allowed for a quantitative dataset to be analyzed and subsequently merged with a qualitative
dataset to understand what contributed to the levels of student staff's stress and
wellness during the pandemic (Creswell, 2008).
Volume 49, No. 3 * 2023 111

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