issue 1 09 - APS Member Groups - Australian Psychological Society

Resilience and Adjustment58that the particular experiences that set matureentry students apart from their school leavercounterparts, including: giving up full-timeemployment, supporting a family, andreintegrating into an academic context (Challis,1976), do not impact resilience. That is, matureentry students who are currently attendinguniversity are not exhibiting greater levels ofresilience than school leaver students inadapting to the university environment.Feinstein and Hammond (2004) suggested thathigher levels of resilience occur as a functionof age, because older adults have the necessaryresources needed to maintain their course ofaction as they have had longer to develop thoseresources. Although age was not specificallyanalysed in the current study, it must behighlighted that mature entry students are, bydefinition, 20 years old or over upon entry, andschool leavers are under 20 years old on entry.Therefore although the current studycontradicts Feinstein and Hammond’s (2004)findings, it is likely that the results fromFeinstein and Hammond (2004) support theidea that the university environment in whichthe sample was obtained is particularly wellequipped for non-traditional students ofdiverse backgrounds (Pooley, Young,Haunold, Pike, & O'Donnell, 2000) and thusdiverse levels of resilience.Further to this, Beasley et al. (2003)suggest that resilience predominantly has alarge impact on mature entry students. Thecurrent study supports the notion that resiliencedoes have a large impact on mature entrystudents’ adjustment to university; however, itdoes not suggest that resilience predominantlyaffects mature entry students over schoolleaver students. The current research is notsuggesting that mature entry students andschool leaver students have the sameexperiences in transitioning to university, butrather, the two groups face different adversitiesthat may culminate in a similar need forresilience to adjust to the universityenvironment.The SACQ is Americanised in that twoitems in particular ask about on-campus living(which are to be omitted if the participant doesnot reside on campus). Living on campus isquite common within American universitypopulations and is less common within theAustralian universities, particularly at the newage university where participants were soughtfor the current study. Future research may focuson adjusting the instrument for an Australiancontext. Finally, research using larger sampleswould also increase the statistical power of thesetypes of studies.Future research may look at beingconducted within the first two weeks of study toexamine whether resilience and adjustment areimportant earlier in the transition process. Animportant variable to include in follow upstudies is academic success. Academic successhas been tied in with adjustment (Baker & Siryk,1986), and it may be of interest to determine towhat extent this is so. It would also beinteresting to find whether resilience has anyimpact on academic success as well. Academicsuccess or at least course completion is,naturally, most students end goal of studying atuniversity.ConclusionThe most pertinent point arising from thefindings suggesting a lack of differencesbetween school leaver and mature entry studentsin terms of adjustment and resilience is thatstudents need to be considered on an individualrather than a group basis. It is surprising thatmature entry students and school leaver studentsdo not differ in their levels of resilience andadaptation, however, it is not unlikely that this istruly the case. These two cohorts areincreasingly put under various and probablyequal pressures when embarking on, andthroughout, their university studies. Given thedisparity in previous research indicatingdifferences between these two groups (e.g.,Compas et al., 1986; Feinstein & Hammond,2004; Justice & Dornan, 2001; Taniguchi &Kaufman, 2005) it seems it is even more likelythat there is no difference between the twogroups. This ties in with findings from UrquhartThe Australian Community Psychologist Volume 21 No 1 June 2009