INVESTIGATION OF THE PSYCHOSOCIAL IMPACTS OF THE PANDEMIC PROCESS ON UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN TERMS OF SOME DEMOGRAPHIC VARIABLES

Abstract

With the first examples in the historical process, universities carrying the mission of leading to change and development on a national and global scale are still considered as one of the most important indicators of the development levels of the countries, although they continue these missions. The importance attributed to universities as a rising value, which we foresee to be at the center of concepts that symbolize the modern world such as science, technology, culture, art, architecture and aesthetics, is increasing. The ability of universities to carry out their missions in the most ideal way and to contribute to the development of humanity is closely related to the educational infrastructure, free-thinking climate and knowledge production culture, as well as the psychosocial structures of their academicians and students. It is possible to state that a possible psychosocial problem that university students may experience will cause breaks in their educational processes and emotions, thoughts and psychological worlds at a level that we cannot predict the limits of influence. In this context, our research aims to investigate the psychosocial effects of the pandemic process called COVID-19, which we can symbolize as an individual, social and global traumatic process, on university students in terms of various demographic variables. The sample of the research consists of a total of 271 university students, 195 (72%) girls and 76 (28%) boys, who participated in the questionnaire that we organized interactively. The data obtained by using the "Pandemic Questionnaire", which we created to determine the level of psychosocial impact of the pandemic process on university students with the "Personal Information Form", were applied in the SPSS program with the frequency, standard deviation, arithmetic mean, Chi-Square test procedures with the significance level of p <0.05. As a result of the procedures carried out, the variables of "gender, class, economic status, department, department willingly choosing the department, taking religious reference in life", except for the variables of "teaching program" and "geographic area of residence", are the source of statistically significant differences and thus, shaping the effect size of the pandemic process. It has been determined that they play an important role.