What‘s the Matter? Assessing Levels of Psychological Mattering and Extracurricular Involvement in Students at Dalhousie University
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Mattering, defined as the extent to which an individual feels they are significant and important, is associated with well-being. The university setting provides emerging adults with the opportunity to develop their identity by exploring new experiences and interests, including by participating in extracurricular activities. In this study, we investigate whether there is a positive relationship between extracurricular participation and feelings of mattering.Methods: Undergraduate students (N = 384) at Dalhousie University completed an online survey measuring extracurricular involvement (using the Dalhousie Extracurricular Involvement Survey) and feelings of mattering. Most participants were women (78%), living off-campus with roommates (45%), and in their second-year of study (36%). The Dalhousie Extracurricular Involvement Survey asked students about the types of extracurriculars they were involved in, the number of hours of participation, and words to describe how they felt when being involved. Data were analyzed with Spearman's correlations and visualized using scatterplots.Results: 59% of participants were involved in extracurricular activities, with the highest proportion of the total sample involved in academic societies (21%). The results indicated weak but significant positive correlations between total hours involved in extracurricular activities, general and interpersonal mattering, and a moderate correlation between involvement and university mattering.Discussion: These results can be used to provide valuable information that universities can use to develop initiatives that reduce stress and promote well-being on campus, and investigate whether extracurricular involvement can be used as a potential intervention to improve mattering in university students.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".