College students' sense of belonging in times of disruption: Prospective changes from before to during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The current study examined whether college students' sense of belonging changed following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were 252 (66.7% female) first- and second-year college students at a large public university in the United States. It was hypothesized that students would report a decrease in their sense of belonging from before to during the pandemic. It was also hypothesized that female students and racial-ethnic minority students, respectively, would report steeper declines in their sense of belonging compared to their male peers and to their White, non-Hispanic peers. Repeated-measures data were analyzed using a multilevel modeling framework to test for mean differences in students' levels of belonging from pre-COVID to during-COVID periods. No direct change in students' sense of belonging was detected. Moderation results indicated that sense of belonging decreased significantly over time for racial-ethnic minority students but not for White, non-Hispanic students. The findings encourage higher education researchers and practitioners to consider the unique experiences of racial-ethnic minority college students during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Development and Acceptability of a Method to Investigate Prescription Drug Misuse in Daily Life: Ecological Momentary Assessment Study.

BACKGROUND: Prescription drug misuse and abuse is an established public health challenge, and young adults are particularly affected. There is a striking lack of real-time, naturalistic data collection assessing intentions to misuse and other precipitating factors at the time of actual misuse, leaving the conditions under which individuals are most likely to misuse prescription medications unknown. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) apps and protocols designed to capture this information would accelerate and expand the knowledge base and could directly contribute to prevention and treatment efforts. OBJECTIVE: The objectives of this study are to describe the development and administration of a mobile app and the EMA protocol designed to collect real-time factors associated with college students' prescription drug misuse intentions and behaviors in daily life; present completion rates, compliance, acceptability, and reactivity associated with the EMA protocol for participants who endorsed recent prescription drug misuse at screening (ie, risk group; n=300) and those who did not (ie, nonrisk group; n=55); and establish initial construct validity by linking the reports of misuse behaviors in daily life collected via the EMA app to prescription drug misuse reported on a standard survey. METHODS: An EMA data collection app and protocol were designed specifically to capture hypothesized contextual factors along with prescription drug misuse intentions and behaviors in daily life. Using this protocol, young adult college students (N=352) completed signal- and event-contingent reports over a 28-day period. When the intention to misuse a prescription drug was endorsed, a brief follow-up prompt was sent 15 min later to collect participants' indications of whether or not misuse had occurred. RESULTS: Risk-group participants were significantly more likely than nonrisk counterparts to endorse any prescription drug misuse intentions in daily life (P<.001), to complete one or more follow-up reports (P<.001), and to endorse any prescription drug misuse behavior in daily life on the follow-ups (P<.001). Overall, participants demonstrated consistent engagement with the EMA procedures and returned an average of 74.5 (SD 23.82; range 10-122) reports. Participants in the risk and nonrisk groups did not differ in the number of reports they completed (P=.12), the number of their reporting days (P=.32), or their average completion rates (P=.14). The results indicated some evidence of reactivity to the momentary reporting procedure. Participants reported uniformly positive experiences and remained highly engaged throughout the reporting protocol and broader study. CONCLUSIONS: The novel EMA app and protocol provide an effective way to assess real-time factors associated with prescription drug misuse intentions and behaviors in daily life. The resulting investigations offer the potential to provide highly translatable information for research and prevention efforts.