The Effects of a Strengths Based Framing Strategy for Reducing Stress in First-Generation College Students

Longstanding discrepancies exist between first-generation college students (FGCS) and continuing-generation college students (CGCS) in enrollment and retention in post-secondary institutions (Eagan et al., 2017; Cataldi et al., 2018). Current retention practices that are employed in post-secondary settings are primarily aimed at instructing FGCS to adjust to university culture; however, this can come at the cost of the unique beliefs, values, and viewpoints that FGCS bring to their university and surrounding community. An alternative strategy of improving the university experience for FGCS involves a shift towards recognizing the strengths that they bring to their university and surrounding community. In the present study, FGCS from American University (N = 62) completed one of two writing prompts; in the experimental group, they identified their own strengths and how they contribute to their surrounding community at their university. The control group completed a writing prompt in which they identified supports needed to succeed within the university. Both groups then underwent a stressful task, and we assessed persistence, task appraisal, self-perceived resilience, affect, and cardiovascular reactivity. We hypothesized that those who complete the strengths-based writing prompt would show increased persistence during the stress task, a more positive appraisal of the task, higher resilience, reduced negative affect following the stress task, and have reduced cardiac reactivity throughout the task. We also hypothesized that belongingness at the university and social support would moderate the relationship between the writing prompt and stress task, such that those who have a higher sense of belonging and more social support will show an even stronger increase in persistence, a more positive appraisal of the task, even higher resilience, reduced negative affect following the stress task, along with an even larger reduction in cardiovascular reactivity. We conducted a series of regression analyses and repeated measures ANOVAs to test our hypotheses. We found partial support for our first hypothesis; experimental group participants were more likely to persist on the stress task compared to control group participants. We found no significant differences across the remaining outcome variables. We also observed three significant moderation effects, but given the low sample size, concerns with the cardiovascular data, and inexplicable patterns, we concluded that these were most likely spurious findings. Positive implications for the continued study of FGCS from a strengths based lens are further discussed.