Swings & roundabouts—measuring stress and student wellbeing

It’s exam time: you’re struggling to pay the electricity bill, an assessment is due, you’re torn between going to a farewell for a childhood friend and studying. University is supposed to be the time of your life but research shows students are significantly more at risk of developing mental health issues than their non-uni-going peers. 

The reason, according to associate lecturer in transdisciplinary innovation and Social Impact Grant recipient, Tyler Key, is actually quite simple.

“It’s not just that you’re young, but that university is a whole other stressor that takes anywhere from 10 to 30 hours a week of effort. In that time, you can’t be working and earning money, you can’t be engaging in relationships and spending time with friends, and you can’t be working on your physical health.”

Over time, neglect of one or more of these areas can have serious consequences for a person’s overall health and sense of self. This is why measurement of wellbeing in a holistic way is so important.

“A lot of people don’t consider what the concept of wellbeing is. We’re so used to putting ourselves in boxes—living as if our physical health has no impact on our mental health, or our financial circumstances have no effect on our relationships and how we function in the world, what if your friends keep asking you to go to expensive restaurants? The reality is, all these domains are intimately connected,” says Tyler.

Current research backs this up—wellbeing isn’t a concept well represented by a linear graph plotted on an x-y axis, but rather as a wheel with the integrity of the whole dependent on each supporting spoke.  

“The question for us as a university has to be: how can we do better?” says Tyler. “Both by our students and by our staff.”

At the moment, there is a gap between assistance provided at UTS to support wellbeing and its take up. 

“Services exist but awareness and engagement with them by both staff and students can be quite low depending on the service. At an even more basic level, we simply don’t know where our staff and students are at and we have no way to measure this.”

Without this information, the university cannot know how effective its programs are or where to invest further resources. Of course, measurement of wellness presents many challenges—putting things into boxes (or discipline silos) is what traditional universities once specialised in. 

“It’s relatively easy to measure someone’s weight and physical fitness but for the mental health aspect and social health aspect it can be hard to quantify objectively. It’s very hard to say what someone else is feeling.”

For this reason, Tyler used UTS’s Social Impact Grant funding to analyse existing subjective tools, such as surveys. Practical considerations also came into play when undertaking the analysis—some scales used to measure wellbeing are 200 questions long, clearly impeding the likely take up by students and/or staff.

Preliminary findings from this research show that the Personal Wellbeing Index and ICOPPE scale appear to be the most appropriate measurement tools of wellbeing for universities because of their reliability, holistic approach and ease of use. 

In future, Tyler aims to build on the research he and research assistant, Cameron Dowd, undertook under the grant to run a pilot study exploring how effective the Personal Wellbeing Index can be when assessing Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation student and staff wellbeing. The proposed pilot has just received ethics approval. 

Ultimately, Tyler hopes this pilot can be learned from and some sort of measurement tool rolled-out across the university.

“If we can show that we have improved our student’s wellbeing that’s a real drawcard. Students want to go to a place where they feel good about themselves, that helps them feel good about themselves. And that’s obviously true for staff too.”