Toward a Resilience Model of Student Well-Being: A Self-Determination Approach to Thriving and Burnout among College Students

The present study investigated the experience of thriving and burnout among college students with regard to their within-person person resilience resources using a Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000) framework. SDT has proposed and documented that satisfaction of the basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness facilitates indicators of well-being in a variety of contexts. However, few studies have explored the ability of the academically grounded basic psychological needs to mediate relations between students' within-person resilience variables (i.e., dispositional optimism and cognitive reappraisal) and indicators of student well-being (i.e., student thriving and student burnout). Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine a model positing that each basic psychological need would fully mediate these relations among 658 current students at a large, upper-midwestern R1 university. The measurement and structural models were a good fit to the data. Dispositional optimism and cognitive reappraisal each had significant positive relations with all three basic needs. Perceived academic competence and perceived campus relatedness has significant positive relations with student thriving while only perceived academic competence significantly related to student burnout. Academic volitional autonomy did not significantly relate to either student well-being indicator. Perceived academic competence fully mediated relations between both resilience variables and both student well-being outcomes. Perceived campus relatedness also fully mediated relations between both within-person resilience variables and student thriving. Conclusions, implications, limitations, and future directions for investigators are discussed. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]