Keats grant supports cross-cultural research on university student adjustment.
Relationships and Psychological Health Lab (RAPHLab)
School of Psychology PhD candidate
Jichun (Jessy) Hao and her supervisors, A/Prof Ross Wilkinson and A/Prof Mark
Rubin, were fortunate enough to be awarded a grant from the John and Daphne
Keats Endowment Research Fund in 2017 to contribute towards research examining
university student adjustment in Australia and China. University students
experience high rates of mental ill-health that threaten academic engagement,
performance and completion. This project, ‘Psychological health in Chinese and
Australian university students: A longitudinal study of attachment,
mindfulness, social integration, and collectivism-individualism’, seeks to
examine the interaction of selected intrapersonal, interpersonal, social, and
exogenous factors that may affect psychological health in both Australian and
Chinese university students in the first two years of study. Jessy, with the assistance of international
collaborators Prof Raymond Chan (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and A/Prof
Binsheng Tian (Yunnan University), collected two-waves of data via online
surveys involving more than 1000 students from the University of Newcastle,
Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing), and Yunnan University (Kunming). This
research aims to advance our understanding of factors influencing student
psychological health, particularly with respect to cultural differences. The
Keats grant supported Jessy and Ross to travel to China in July to assist with
data collection at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing), and to meet with
Prof Chan and his lab team to discuss project related issues. This visit was
highly successful in sharing knowledge and collaboration with Prof Chan for the
project write-up and for future projects, publications, and presentations.
Jessy also visited Yunnan University to gain further insight into student life
and how research is conducted in the Chinese academic environment. Jessy and
the team are now in the final stage of second wave data collection, and
preparing publications with their international collaborators, with the aim of
increasing our understanding of university adjustment and helping inform policy
and strategies with respect to factors influencing domestic and international
student welfare and retention.
For more information about this research please contact Jichun.Hao@uon.edu.au or Ross.Wilkinson@newcastle.edu.au
For more information about this research please contact Jichun.Hao@uon.edu.au or Ross.Wilkinson@newcastle.edu.au
