How Social and Emotional Abilities Affect College Students' Resilience: An Investigation of Students at a University in an Urban Setting

Abstract

Every student at college of any age is under academic pressure, has relationship issues, is uncertain about employment, is worried about finances, has different social relationships and is always adapting to different school environments. These circumstances are important psychological and educational assets in the development of resilience. Social and emotional competences offer students processes for monitoring their feelings, managing their emotional reactions, comprehending the feelings of others, sustaining social interactions and accessing social support in stressful situations. The present study explores the link between social and emotional competencies and resilience in college students attending a university in an urban environment. Structured questionnaire data will be collected on a 5-point Likert scale and a quantitative research design using a cross section approach will be proposed. In the analytical framework emotional awareness, emotion regulation, stress tolerance, empathy, interpersonal skills, and social competence are defined as the dimensions of social and emotional abilities and the students' resilience is defined as the dependent construct. The numerical demonstration is made on the basis of a sample of 1,411 students at the university. The analytical framework includes descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, correlation analysis, analysis of variance, multiple regression and structural equation modelling. These illustrative results show that emotional abilities and social abilities are positively related to resilience. Emotional skills show the higher standardised effect and social skills give an extra significant contribution. The model has an R2 of 48.0% for the variance in student resilience. Other dimensions that stand out are emotional regulation and stress tolerance, and interpersonal skills and empathy. The effects of gender and marital status are comparatively low, and differences in resilience are seen in educational attainment and living arrangement. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the college students' resilience correlates with their intrapersonal emotional and interpersonal social resources. Implications for university counselling, university learning and development, curriculum design, peer-support programmes, mentoring programmes, and SEL programmes are discussed.