The relationship between academic vs. family/personal role conflict and Malaysian students' psychological wellbeing during COVID-19 lockdown

The psychological wellbeing of remote-learning university students is becoming an increasing concern for educators in the COVID-19 era, due to the potential risk of conflict between academic and family/personal lives in the unusual environments they must now operate in. To determine how this conflict might influence students' psychological wellbeing, we asked 1,005 university students in Malaysia to complete two types of work/life conflict measures online; one that measured academic work interfering with family/personal lives vs. another that tapped into family/personal lives interfering with academic work. Results showed that approximately 50% of the participants encountered the first conflict, while close to 40% experienced the latter. More importantly, the results further revealed that an increased experience of the first conflict (i.e. academic work undermining family roles) predicted higher levels of stress, anxiety, depression, social dysfunction and loss of confidence, but not unhappiness, while an increased occurrence of the second type of conflict (i.e. family roles undermining academic work) was associated with elevated stress, anxiety, depression, loss of confidence and unhappiness, but not social dysfunction.