Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected college students, their learning process, maintaining relationships, and lifestyle amid social distancing. Despite the university's support for the government's decision on self-isolation, a number of students chose not to obey. Some of students violated self-isolation regime feeling stopped in their way of life though following these rules. In our research we are interested whether this decision could have been supported by specific coping strategies and locus of control. This study aims to identify differences in locus of control and coping strategies between college students who followed and broke self-isolation despite the position of their university and government. Qualitative data were collected from 82 university students in Moscow during COVID-19 lockdown. 42 of then followed self isolation rules and 40 student were self-isolation breakers. The data was divided according to the students' answer to the question “Do you follow self-isolation?” and four questionnaires: Proactive Coping Inventory, PCI (Greenglas, Schwarzer, Taubert, 1999 adapted by E. V. Starchenkova, 2009), Coping Strategy Indicator, CSI (Amirkhan adapted by N.A. Sirota, 1994), Ways of Coping Questionnaire (Folkman & Lazarus, 1988 adapted by L.I. Vassrman, 2004), Locus of control scale (E.F. Bazhin, E. A. Golynkina, L. M. Etkind). We used a Mann-Whitney U-test in order to find out differences between two groups of students. Mann-Whitney test showed that students who violated self-isolation had higher results in such coping strategies as Proactive, Reflective, Confrontive, Seeking Support, including Instrumental and Emotional Support Seeking, Problem Solving, Avoidance. Those, who followed self-isolation had higher results in Self-controlling coping and Locus Control (external locus control of relationship, family relations, achievement, failure, illness and health).

Keywords:

Self-Isolation, COVID-19, coping, locus control.