Faculty note: Research group awarded Best Paper at Midwest Academy of Management Conference
The research paper, “The Effects of Covid-19 on College Students” was awarded Best Paper of the 2021 Midwest Academy of Management conference this past weekend in Davenport, Iowa hosted by St. Ambrose University. This research is the result of the inaugural year’s work of the 2020/21 Student Association of Management (SAM) Research Group in the Austin E. Cofrin School of Business. It includes Dianne Murphy, Ph.D., Brittany Cassidy (senior), Brinley Kowalkowski (senior), Rita Ebbott (’21), and David Radosevich, Ph.D. The manuscript is currently under review for publication at the Journal of Managerial Issues.
Said Murphy, “We are grateful to the UWGB Austin E. Cofrin School of Business faculty who helped us collect our data (Patty Albers, Gaurav Bansal, Preston Cherry, Matthew Geimer, Kevin Jaklin, myself and David Radosevich), the UWGB IRB, and the UWGB students who participated in the research. Additionally, thanks to Dean Mathew Dornbush and Kathryn Marten, Student & Community Engagement Coordinator, for providing the funding for Brittany and Brinley to join me in attending and presenting at the conference. It was priceless for them to be there in person not only as researchers exchanging ideas with other scholars, but as the Best Paper recipients! They represented UWGB well!”
ABSTRACT: We apply Hobfoll’s (1989) Conservation of Resource (COR) theory in examining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on college students. In spring 2021, business school students completed an online survey measuring their experience during the global COVID-19 pandemic. In support of COR theory, results demonstrated that students with lower resources (i.e., lower socioeconomic status) reported significantly more resource loss; increases in resource loss were significantly associated with increases in stress; and stress was significantly negatively related to physical health, psychological health, and well-being. Furthermore, students who experienced loss spirals reported overall high levels of stress, regardless of the amount of resource loss they encountered; and a reevaluation of resources buffered for stress under high resource loss but had the opposite effect under low resource loss. Moderated mediation analysis using PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2018) resulted in significant evidence for the indirect path of low resource → resource loss → stress → psychological health/well-being when the students did not report a loss spiral and in separate analyses, when students re-evaluated their resources. Examining an impacted sample of students during a global pandemic allows us to better understand the interplay of resources, stress, and outcomes. Theoretical and applied implications are discussed for future research. References Hayes, A. F. 2018. Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford. Hobfoll, S. E. 1989. Conservation of resources: a new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3): 513-524.
