Event venue: Old Government Building Lecture Theatre 2 (GBLT2), Pipitea Campus, Victoria University of Wellington

An extensive international literature documents low and decreasing levels of tertiary student wellbeing across a range of OECD countries. The costs of low wellbeing to the students, the tertiary institutions and the country as a whole are high but remain largely undocumented, unquantified and largely unaddressed.

Compared to Australia in particular, New Zealand’s documentation of tertiary student wellbeing has been slow, fragmented and superficial. In response Victoria University of Wellington has applied a wellbeing screening instrument (the WHO-5) as part of its annual Student Experience and Improvement Survey (SEIS). Analysis of the approximately 4000 responses returned in recent years suggests low average levels of student wellbeing based on both internal criteria (scores of < 13 on the WHO-5) and against external  benchmarking of adolescents in New Zealand and young adults in Europe.

While a valuable start, the SEIS survey was not designed to comprehensively describe or account for student wellbeing. Therefore a complementary wellbeing survey (named ‘YOU’) has been developed by a team of academics, health and service professionals and students at Victoria University with the express aim of learning more about the wellbeing of undergraduate students. A benchmark survey of over 1500 first year students was undertaken in April/May 2019 followed by a second wave follow-up in August 2019.

This seminar will introduce the survey and report on: a) The nature of (first year) student wellbeing and its distribution, b) The primary correlates of student wellbeing (based on the benchmark survey), and c) the relationship between the values students hold and their expressed levels of wellbeing, and the association of personality with wellbeing measures.

Emeritus Professor Philip S. Morrison recently served as Professor of Human Geography in the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington. He is Chair of the multidisciplinary research team administering the YOU, tertiary student wellbeing survey - a longitudinal, multi-cohort study at Victoria University of Wellington.

Please note, this seminar will not be webcast.

For further information, please contact the HSRC administrator at HSRC@vuw.ac.nz.