Remote Working and Home Learning: How the Italian Academic Population Dealt with Changes Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced changes in people’s lives that affected their mental health. Our study aimed to explore the level of psychological distress in the academic population during the lockdown period and investigate its association with the new working or studying conditions. The study sample included 9364 students and 2159 employees from five Italian universities from the study IO CONTO 2020. We applied linear regression models to investigate the association between home learning or remote working conditions and psychological distress, separately for students and employees. Psychological distress was assessed using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). In both students and employees, higher levels of distress were significantly associated with study/work–family conflicts, concerns about their future careers, and inadequacy of equipment; in employees, higher levels of distress were significantly associated with a lack of clarity on work objectives. Our results are in line with previous research on the impact of spaces and equipment in remote working/studying from home. Moreover, the study contributes to deepening the association between well-being and telework–family conflict, which in the literature is still equivocal. Practical implications require academic governance to promote sustainable environments both in remote and hybrid work conditions, by referring to a specific management by objectives approach.

Perception of the Effects of Working from Home on Isolation and Stress by Spanish Workers during COVID-19 Pandemic

“…This result contradicts several reports, such as those by Beckel and Fisher (2022), Calleja and Mota (2022), Pataki-Bittó and Kun (2022) and de Sousa et al (2022), regarding the link between being female and mental issues. Macciotta et al (2022), Heiden et al (2021), Mendonça et al (2022), Pataki-Bittó and Kun (2022), Maillot et al (2022) and Niu et al (2021) found a significant relationship between having children to care for and stress. However, our findings are not an exception.…”

“…Individual Variables 2.1.1. Sociodemographic Variables Socioeconomic factors have often been found to be relevant in explaining stress and isolation in WFH practices (Pataki-Bittó and Kun 2022;Sutarto et al 2021;Beckel and Fisher 2022;Song and Gao 2020;Mendonça et al 2022;de Sousa et al 2022;Macciotta et al 2022;Fang et al 2022). Many studies have reported that gender is a relevant variable to explain positive and negative feelings and psychological effects such as stress and isolation produced by home teleworking (Song and Gao 2020;Mendonça et al 2022).…”

“…Usually, women perceive worse effects from WFH because they still play a more prominent role than men do in household duties (Beckel and Fisher 2022;Kohont and Ignjatović 2022) and in the care of children (Calleja and Mota 2022;Pataki-Bittó and Kun 2022;Sutarto et al 2021) and, in general, of dependent persons (Beckel and Fisher 2022;de Sousa et al 2022). These reasons explain why they are usually more sensitive to work-from-home conflicts (Magnier-Watanabe et al 2022;Macciotta et al 2022). Fang et al (2022) warned that home telecommuting during the pandemic may have pushed gender inequality.…”

“…Parental duties arise, and spaces and ICT resources must include more persons (Fana et al 2020). Authors such as Macciotta et al (2022), Heiden et al (2021), Mendonça et al (2022) and Niu et al (2021) found that the existence of children at home exacerbates stress perceptions and makes it more difficult to balance work and a personal life. In this regard, Pataki-Bittó and Kun (2022) report that during the COVID-19 confinement measures, the stress level of home teleworkers without children was significantly lower than that of those with children.…”

“…Of course, the preference for WFH may also include good connectivity and ICT equipment (Macciotta et al 2022;Maillot et al 2022;Pelissier et al 2021) given that a great concern of telecommuters is the difficulty of accessing the information needed to carry out tasks from home (Mello 2007;Tahavori 2015;Nakrošien ė et al 2019;Nguyen 2021); thus, control of work is lost (Schade et al 2021). A home with poor ICT infrastructure that is not comfortable for telecommuting hurts well-being (Elldér 2019;Kitagawa et al 2021;Schade et al 2021).…”