ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has impacted negatively on the lives and academic activities of university students. This has contributed to increasing levels of psychological distress among this population group. Intrinsic and contextual factors can mediate the psychological impact of the pandemic. The study focuses on sense of coherence and ego-resilience as potential protective factors on indices of psychological distress and life satisfaction. Participants were undergraduate students (N = 337) at a South African university who completed six self-report questionnaires, namely, the Beck Hopelessness Scale, the University of California Los Angeles Loneliness Scale, the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, the Sense of Coherence Scale, the Ego-Resilience Scale, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. To examine the direct and mediating effects of sense of coherence and ego-resilience on psychological distress, structural equation modeling was used. Compared to previous research, greater psychological distress was found in the current sample. Moreover, while the hopelessness-life satisfaction relationship was only partially mediated by protective factors, the depression-life satisfaction relationship was fully mediated by sense of coherence and ego-resilience. The direct association between ego-resilience as well as sense of coherence and life satisfaction was significant, suggesting that these factors have a health-sustaining role.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: We aimed to verify the structural relationship between sports participation, ego-resilience, and health-promoting behavior of Korean adolescents in a pandemic situation. METHODS: In Nov 2020, an online survey was conducted with 751 adolescents in Korea. The data obtained through the survey were analyzed in several ways, including frequency, reliability, confirmatory factor, descriptive statistical, and path analyses. RESULTS: Sports participation had a positive effect on ego-resilience and health-promoting behavior, while egoresilience has a positive effect on health-promoting behavior. Overall, sports participation directly affects health-promoting behavior and that an indirect effect occurs through ego-resilience. CONCLUSION: Educational institutions such as schools and the Korea Offices of Education should devise various measures so that adolescents growing up in a global pandemic situation can strengthen their health-promoting behavior by securing ego-resilience through participation in various sports.
ABSTRACT
Recently, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, several lockdown and stay-at-home regulations have been implemented worldwide. In this regard, loneliness has been identified as the signature mental health consequence of this pandemic. The aim of this study is to explore the associations among loneliness, hopelessness, depression, ego-resilience and life satisfaction in a random sample of young adults (N = 337) at a university in the Western Cape of South Africa. Parallel and serial mediation analysis supported the hypothesis that loneliness is associated with hopelessness, which in turn is associated with depression, and that ego-resilience mediates the association between all the negative indices of psychological well-being and life satisfaction. These findings suggest that mental health interventions that boost ego-resilience and target loneliness may help in dealing with the mental health consequences of COVID-19.