The Impact of Psychological Distress Due to COVID-19 on College Student Career Development

Sara Driver; Emily Bullock-Yowell

doi:10.5334/spo.32

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been an ongoing public health crisis and continues to create a variety of challenges (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020). Since the challenges of COVID-19 seem to be particularly salient for traditional college-age students (Kujawa et al., 2020) and career development is a corner stone of development at this stage, the current study investigated what impact the COVID-19 pandemic-related stress has on the psychological distress, career-development self-efficacy, and career decidedness of a sample of college students. Three hundred one students from a southeastern United States university participated in the study. We hypothesize 1) Impacts from pandemic stress will negatively impact the career development (i.e., self-efficacy and decidedness) of college students and 2) psychological distress will mediate the relationship between pandemic stress and the career development of college students.

The analysis revealed that pandemic stress does not directly impact the career development of college students. However, mediation analyses revealed a positive indirect relationship between pandemic stress and career decidedness when accounting for psychological distress as well as a negative indirect relationship between pandemic stress and career decision making self-efficacy when accounting for psychological distress. While impacts from COVID-19-related stress did not directly account for changes in career decision making self-efficacy and decidedness on its own, when in the presence of psychological distress the relationship between pandemic stress and career development exist. Moreover, the positive relationship between pandemic stress and career decidedness suggests that higher pandemic stress is associated with more career undecidedness when accounting for psychological distress. Likewise, the negative relationship between pandemic stress and career decision making self-efficacy suggests that higher pandemic stress is associated with lower levels of self-efficacy when making career decisions. Practical implications for these findings are discussed.

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The Impact of Psychological Distress Due to COVID-19 on College Student Career Development

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