Who's Doing OK? What 'College Adjustment' Really Means

Lecturer

Virginia Wickline

Corporate Author/Producer

Georgia Southern University

Media Type

Audio

Date of Lecture

4-13-2021

Description of Lecture

Students have many stressors, changes, and challenges to navigate when coming to college. Historically, college adjustment measures have been fairly limited in scope, measuring adjustment that is relevant for a clinical context with at-risk students (e.g., anxiety, depression, suicide). In order to better assess how student populations are adjusting to college, a broader, more holistic measure of college-life adjustment was developed: The Wooster-Wickline College Adjustment Test (WOWCAT). Consisting of ten sub-scales, the WOWCAT collectively assesses self-reported levels of adjustment in myriad domains: Friendship/Social Life, Living Arrangements, Extracurricular Involvement, Academic Performance/Study Habits, College-Specific Anxiety, College-Specific Depression, Problematic Substance Use, Family Relationships/Support Network, Learning to be Independent, and Coping/Resources. The WOWCAT was initially developed and successfully analyzed with a primarily White, exclusively residential student population at a small, private, liberal arts college in the Midwest more than a decade ago. However, it also validly and reliably measures college adjustment in our current, more diverse, more non-traditional, more military-involved, and partly-commuter population at Georgia Southern. Dr. Wickline introduces and advocates for the use of this measure in whole or in part by staff and faculty to enable students for a successful journey through university life.

Comments

Dr. Wickline is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Georgia Southern University.

This lecture was hosted and broadcast by community radio station WRUU Savannah 107.5 (wruu.org) during Spring 2021.

Recommended Citation

Wickline, Virginia, "Who's Doing OK? What 'College Adjustment' Really Means" (2021). Robert Ingram Strozier Lecture Series (1993-present). 73.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/strozier-lecture-series/73

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.