First-Year Students' Psychological Resilience and College Adjustment: A Person-Oriented Approach

Previous research has concentrated on psychological resilience as a holistic structure and has found that resilience positively affects college adjustment. However, it is suggested by existing literature that college students' resilience is a multidimensional construct. Furthermore, there is limited understanding regarding the categorizations of resilience among first-year college students and its influence on their college adjustment. This study aimed to identify the profiles of first-year college students' resilience, including individual powers and supportive powers, and explore the effects of varying resilience profiles on first-year students' college adjustment. A valid sample of 771 first-year college students from 28 Chinese colleges participated in this survey. The online surveys were conducted through Wenjuanxing platform. Data were analyzed using latent profile analysis to identify first-year college students' different resilience profile and examine the relationships with college adjustment. Four groups featuring unique resilient characteristics were discovered: well-resilient students, students with low individual power but high supportive power, students with high individual power but low supportive power, and mal-resilient students with low individual power and low supportive power. Well-resilient first-year students reported the best condition of college adjustment compared to the other groups, which supports the conservation of resources (COR) theory. These results provide insight into first-year college students' particular and heterogeneous circumstances at the beginning of the college experience. They also refined the COR theory by identifying individual-specific relationships between psychological resilience and college adjustment.