a growing experience - Student Services - University of Melbourne

HEALTH AND WELL-BEING OF INTERNATIONAL STUDENTSanalysis resulted in two functions based on four variables: course type (undergraduateor not), LOTE use (yes or no), Hong Kong student (yes or no), and student fromUK/USA/Canada (yes or no). However, using these two functions, only 50.9 per centof students’ classifications could be made correctly. Because this is a clearlyunsatisfactory result, it was concluded that these common demographic variables didnot provide a useful basis for prediction of students’ mode of adaptation to universitylife in Melbourne. This suggests that the characteristic ways in which students adaptto university life might be more strongly associated with other factors, such aspersonal, behavioural and psychological factors, rather than with broad demographicfactors. If this is the case, then the three styles of adaptation resulting from thiscluster analysis could represent a typology applicable to domestic as well as tointernational students.If the typology is both valid and useful, one would expect that students’ satisfaction,psychological states and behaviour in different domains could be hypothesised todiffer, based on their style of adaptation. These would, of course, need to be differentdomains from the ones used to create the typology.One relevant area of interest concerns students’ use of university services, particularlythe health and counselling services. Do students with different styles of adaptationshow different patterns of service usage? Two aspects were investigated: students’perceptions of their need for help by these two services and their actual request forhelp, if they saw a need.• Fewer students than expected with a positive, connected style of adaptation sawthe need for health or counselling services. More students than expected with anunconnected and stressed or a distressed and risk-taking mode of adaptation feltthe need for help from the health or the counselling services 365 . These results areconsistent with the relative levels of physical and mental health, and of otherassociated variables, that define the three styles of adaptation.• Of those students who saw the need for help from the health or counsellingservice, more positive, connected adaptors than expected acted on their need,while fewer unconnected and stressed adaptors acted on their needs. Studentswith a distressed and risk-taking mode of adaptation, acted on their needs at aboutthe expected level 366 . For students exhibiting the first two styles of adaptation(but not the third), this is consistent with the findings thato depression is a negative predictor of acting on the need for help from thehealth service and thato stress and cultural stress are negative predictors of seeking help from thecounselling service when there is a perceived need.Students whose style of adaptation is positive and connected have the highest score onthe Connectedness scale and those whose style is unconnected and stressed have thelowest. It might therefore be expected that style of adaptation would distinguishamong students’ patterns of social mixing in Australia. This proved to be the case.Students whose mode is unconnected and stressed mix significantly less withAustralians both within the University (D11) and off campus (D17) than students witheither of the other two styles 367 . At the university, students whose style of adaptationis unconnected and stressed have the highest level of mixing with co-culturals (D3),365 Health: 2 = 24.83, 2 df, p