Fatores de risco e proteção na universidade: associações com resiliência e bem-estar subjetivo acadêmico

Abstract

The present work is linked to the research line 2 - Formation and action of the teaching professional and educational practices of the Graduate Program in Education at UNOESTE. Entrance to university is a marker of significant changes in the lives of young people and adults. The university environment, with its peculiarities, can be configured as a context marked by factors that drive affective, cognitive and professional development, but also by factors that expose the university to adverse situations that generate suffering. Thus, this research aimed to verify possible correlations between risk factors, protective factors, subjective well-being and resilience in undergraduate students from different areas of knowledge. To this end, two research itineraries were outlined. In the first itinerary, an exploratory quantitative research is presented, which aimed to build and verify the psychometric properties of the Risk and Protection Factors Scale in the university environment. Four judges participated in this study for the semantic analysis and estimation of the Content Validity Coefficient (CVC). For the analysis of the internal structure, the sample consisted of 412 Brazilian university students from public and private universities. The results showed the need to eliminate an item whose CVC was less than 0.80. As for the internal structure, 18 items were kept, divided into three factors, as it was the best model found in the exploratory factor analysis. The second itinerary of this research involves a quantitative investigation that aimed to estimate the correlations between the scores of three instruments: School Subjective Well-being Scale (EBESE), Wagnild and Young Resilience Scale, Risk and Protection Factors Scale in the university environment. The 412 participants were students from public (N=294) and private (N=118) universities throughout the country. With regard to age group, the lowest age corresponded to 17 years and the highest to 67 years (Average: 25.92, SD: 8.769). Regarding gender, the sample consisted of 295 female participants (71.60%) and 116 male participants (28.15%), and one participant marked the option “other” (0.243%). Descriptive analyzes of the means of the instruments, Pearson correlation between them, regression analysis and path analysis were performed, both considering the variables subjective well-being and resilience as dependente variables, and the variables of risk and protection factors in the university environment, as independente variables. The results indicate that the risk and protective factors present in the university environment explain by different degrees the resilience and the academic subjective well-being of the university students in the sample. The most significant results were found in the factor “Positive affects” (a component of subjective academic well-being), with the risk and protection factors explaining 47% of their variance, followed by the factor “Resolution of actions and values”, from the scale of resilience, in which the risk and protective factors explained it in 29%.