Role of Resilience in Buffering the Effect of Work-School Conflict on Negative Emotional Responses and Sleep Health of College Students

More than 70% of college students are employed while taking classes, and juggling these demands create a strain on students, with strain manifesting itself in several ways including lower academic achievement (Markel & Frone, 1998), increased prevalence of mental health issues such as depression and anxiety (Mounsey, Vandehey, Diekhoff, 2013), and the inability to maintain proper sleep hygiene (Augner, 2011). This trend of working a significant amount of hours while taking college classes is unlikely to change, fostering a research emphasis on identifying factors that facilitate college students’ ability to handle the stress of these multiple competing demands. Resilience is one such promising moderator of stressors on strain as resilience has been shown to reduce negative emotional responses such as feeling overwhelmed (Abolghasemi, Varaniyab, 2010). This study examined the extent to which resilience buffered the effects of work-school conflict on college students’ negative emotional response (NERs) and sleep health. We predicted that resilience was expected to moderate the effect of WSC on NERs such under higher WSC, the negative effect of resilience and on NERs was expected to be weaker under higher rather than lower resilience. For those experiencing lower WSC, resilience was expected to exert negligible effects on NERs