Understanding University Students' Conceptualizations and Perceptions of Kindness: A Mixed Methods Study

Attending university can present a host of challenges for undergraduate students and the mental health of students has increasingly become a concern as students struggle to meet the demands of new academic and social expectations. Despite several studies assessing the effects of being kind on well-being, there remains a dearth of research identifying how students understand and enact kindness. The aims of this study were to integrate a kindness assignment into undergraduate coursework, to explore how students define and enact kindness, and to examine how being kind impacted students' perceptions of themselves, their peers, and their campus. Students were asked to complete a series of five kind acts and administered a series of pre- and post-assignment measures and open-ended prompts. Consistent with our hypotheses, participants who completed at least 3 of the 5 planned acts of kindness reported significantly higher scores on measures of in-person kindness (d = 0.46, p = 0.04) and peer connectedness (d = 0.46, p = 0.04). Participants did not, however, report significantly higher scores on measures of self-perceived online kindness (d = 0.12, p = 0.59) or on their perception of the kindness of their campus community (d = 0.09, p = 0.68). Participants in this study planned a total of 492 acts, which were coded using content analysis. The salient themes in kind acts were "Helping Others," "Giving," "Demonstrating Appreciation," and "Communicating." This study demonstrated that a curriculum-based kindness intervention was well received by students and resulted in students performing varied acts of kindness that positively impacted their self-ratings of kindness and peer connectedness.