JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Concern about the mental health and wellbeing of students in university education continues to mount. Psychoeducation has the potential to support students experiencing varying levels of distress and help meet the demand for support, however there is a need to understand how these programmes are used and experienced. Online diaries are a particularly useful activity for psychoeducation due to their therapeutic benefits, ability to capture naturalistic data relevant to wellbeing, and appropriateness for computerized text analysis methods.

Objective:

The goal of this study was to examine how university students use electronic diaries within a psychoeducation programme designed to enhance mental wellbeing (Science of Happiness Course).

Methods:

The Science of Happiness course was administered to 154 undergraduate students within a university setting (United Kingdom). Online diaries were collected from students for a total of 9 weeks. Baseline wellbeing data were collected using the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (SWEMWBS). The percentage of negative and positive emotion words used in diaries (emotional tone) and use of words from 5 life domains (social, work, money, health, and leisure) was calculated using the LIWC2015 software. Random effects (generalized least squares) regression models were estimated in STATA 16 to examine the to examine how far time, diary characteristics, demographics and baseline wellbeing predict the emotion tone of diary entries.

Results:

A total of 149 students participated in the diary study, producing 1124 individual diary entries. Compliance to the diary task peaked in week 1 (93%) and was at its lowest in week 3 (72%). Compared to week 1, diaries were significantly more positive in their emotional tone during week 5 (mean difference 23.90, 95% CI: 16.89, 30.90) and week 6 (26.62, 95% CI: 19.35, 33.88) when students were tasked with writing about gratitude and their strengths. Across weeks, moderate and high baseline SWEMWBS scores were associated with a higher percentage of positive emotion words in diaries (increases compared with low SWEMWBS scoring students were 5.03 (95% CI: 0.08, 9.98) and 7.48 (95% CI: 1.84, 13.12) respectively). At week 1, the diaries of students with the highest levels of baseline SWEMWBS (82.92, 95% CI: 73.08, 92.76) were noticeably more emotionally positive on average than the diaries of students with the lowest levels of baseline SWEMWBS (59.38, 95% CI: 51.02, 67.73). Diaries largely focused on the use of social words. The emotional tone of diary entries was positively related to use of leisure (3.56, 95% CI: 2.28, 4.85), social (0.74, 95% CI: 0.21, 1.27), and inversely to health words (-1.96, 95% CI: -3.70, -0.22).

Conclusions:

We found evidence for short-term task specific spikes in the emotional positivity of online diary entries, and recommend future studies examine the possibility of longer-term impacts on the writing and wellbeing of students. With student wellbeing in mind, universities should ensure leisure and social activities are facilitated and encouraged.