Redefining self-care through positive education: university student perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Faced with innumerable stressors and responsibilities, university students are particularly susceptible to mental health and well-being challenges. Self-care practices have been shown to help mitigate stress and health problems. One way university students can learn self-care practices is through positive education, the teaching of positive psychology. However, minimal research has assessed the role positive education plays in students’ self-care behaviours. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the impact of an undergraduate positive education course on students’ self-care practices and, in turn, their mental health, quality of life, and happiness. Five undergraduate students participated in a focus group to discuss their experiences in a positive education course offered at a large Canadian university. With 75 students across two sections, the course consisted of 12 weekly three-hour sessions, combining theoretical teachings in positive psychology with practical activities to foster student well-being and flourishing. Reflexive thematic analyses revealed that the course encouraged students to engage in self-care practices which, by extension, enhanced their mental health, quality of life, and happiness. There was a general consensus among participants that these improvements stemmed from increased self-kindness, slowness, awareness, and particularly social connection. In fact, the participants learned to prioritize both themselves and their social relationships as essential aspects of self-care. These findings support the importance of offering positive education courses in university settings and demonstrate the benefits of promoting self-care as both an individual and collective practice in these courses.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".