Students’ Sense-Making of Events During the COVID-19 Pandemic and its Relationship to Mental Wellbeing

Superordinate constructions and meaning making structures are hypothesised by different psychological theories to provide individuals with a sense of integration of events or sense-making, which is associated to psychological wellbeing. There has been a general dearth of research in relation to the integration / sense-making of the COVID-19 pandemic events in Higher Education student populations. Personal Construct Psychology’s (Kelly, 1955) methods such as repertory grids and ladders are especially useful tools in the study of sense-making processes. An online survey which included repertory grids, ladders, and questionnaires of meaning and psychological wellbeing was completed by N=101 students from the University of Hertfordshire. The aims were to explore the students’ construing of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to test a series of hypotheses proposed as strategies for clinicians to identify superordinate constructs in repertory grids and ladders, which could help them promote sense-making during interventions. Emotional, relational and personal content predominated the students’ construing of the pandemic; issues related to potentially divisive social or political dynamics of the pandemic generated less important constructs. Although more than half of the sample had levels of psychological distress above clinical thresholds for anxiety, the COVID-specific anxiety was low. Students from the global majority showed lower levels of sense-making of their pandemic worst events than white students. Two grid and ladder measures were associated to positive outcomes in measures of sense-making and psychological wellbeing: overall grid construct intensity and number of ladder rungs. These relationships were stronger when laddering was undertaken from the participants’ least important constructs, which were also more reliably identified by them in comparison with the more important constructs. Clinical implications of these findings and future directions for research are discussed. Limitations were related to data-quality issues arising from the online methodology, as well as from probable statistical underpowering.