Chapters in Books
Abstract:
The Student Resilience and Well-Being Project (SRWBP) was a collaborative effort to address concerns about college students’ resilience and well-being involving academic researchers and student affairs professionals at four private higher education institutions. In this paper, we provide a practically oriented, high-level description of three major components of the project. Each concludes with a brief discussion of significant challenges and how they were addressed. We begin with an overview of the project that emphasizes administrative challenges associated with coordinating and deploying the efforts of multiple researchers and practitioners at four schools with no prior experience working together on similar projects. We next describe the four-year longitudinal study that became the centerpiece of the project, emphasizing the challenges associated with coordinating researchers’ interests, recruiting and retaining student participants, and incorporating information from student records into the data set. Effective use of the resultant large and complex data set necessitated systems and policies for its management, storage, documentation, and sharing of the large amount of data, which is summarized in the next section. The paper concludes with a summary of the broader challenges and lessons learned from the SRWBP and recommendations for teams considering similar efforts.