Student loneliness through the pandemic: How, why and where?

Case Study

This research project on student loneliness was co-authored by Professor Richard Phillips in the School of Geography and a group of undergraduate and postgraduate students. A link to the full article is here.

This article is a very emotive piece of work that explores the impact on students of the lockdowns and restrictions placed on all of their lives, and the lives of everyone else, during the COVID-19 pandemic. These restrictions, as well as COVID-19 itself, required unprecedented changes to the ways students lived and interacted with each other, as well as forcing them to shift their expectations of what student life would look like. The study found that this manifested itself in three disruptions: to relationships, to their ability to ‘put down roots’ and to their movement through life transitions.

The paper explored the physical and psychological spaces and objects that were significant to the students during this time, and why. It brought in students as co-researchers in this process in a variety of ways including data collection and analysis.

The Conversation

Hannah Raine, Research Assistant for the Connect & Reflect project, met for a short conversation with Will Haynes, one the of the student co-authors for this piece of work. The conversation served as an opportunity to reflect and discuss the meaning of this participatory work to him as a student, as well as a postgraduate researcher himself interested in the place and challenges of participatory research.

He carried out interviews with other students as well as a ‘self-interview’ to explore student experiences, which would then be physically written up into a diary that would be saved as an ‘object’ from this time.

A link to the interview is provided below. Musical Credit: Y'know by Miyamoto. Available here from Soundcloud: https://m.soundcloud.com/miyamoto2k2

Final Friday Working Multitrack Session with Will Haynes_mixdown.mp3

Angus Goldsmith, Co-researcher Perspectives

Angus Goldsmith, fellow student co-researcher, also provided his perspective on the experience of co-research on this project:

My time as a junior researcher on this project was thoroughly enjoyable. I felt pride in putting into practice what I had learned at university in the previous four years, and also a sense of achievement in observing how these gained skills had real-world applicability.

Working alongside a well respected and highly proficient Lead Researcher could be daunting at times - it made me highly aware of everything I was doing and occasionally second-guess my decisions. This was through no direct action of the Lead Researcher, but instead came from me being nervous performing something I had done many times before, but now in front of someone. It felt like I was a tennis player having my first match, and although I had served hundreds of times before, there was now a crowd watching. I imagine the Lead Researcher could sense this feeling of nervousness in me, and they accommodated this by explaining things as many times as was necessary, and were patient when I was trying to figure out the process of research. A future recommendation for co-researchers would be to follow what my Lead Researcher did, and be patient, supportive and nurturing of the learning process of new researchers. This will help encourage individuals into the co-research process by giving them assurance they will not be scolded by more senior individuals. No one wants to work in a kitchen with a scary Head Chef!

References

Phillips, R., Seaborne, K., Goldsmith, A., Curtis, N., Davies, A., Haynes, W., McEnroe, R., Murphy, N., O’Neill, L., Pacey, C., Walker, E., & Wordley, E. (2022). Student loneliness through the pandemic: How, why and where? The Geographical Journal, 188(2), 277–293. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12438

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