Using culture to manage the transition into university: Conceptualising the dynamics of withdrawal and engagement

Introduction

Tertiary education has become a major part of many young adults’ lives. In 2010, two-thirds of Australian school leavers were enrolled in a full-time university bachelor course (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2010). At this time in their lives, school leavers are starting to emerge as young adults, establishing independence from their parents, forming romantic relationships and seeking employment (Roisman, Masten, Coatsworth, & Tellegen, 2004). In addition to the normal life-course transitions of this age, entering university can bring additional changes such as forming new social relationships, relocation and academic adjustments (Pittman & Richmond, 2008). Hence, the commencement of university studies can be a stressful experience impacting the subjective well-being of new students (Bewick, Koutsopoulou, Miles, Slaa, & Barkham, 2010). For example, Stallman (2010) found that university students showed significantly greater psychological distress than the general population. The results of a longitudinal study by Bewick and colleagues (2010) support such data, with students’ levels of psychological distress increasing after commencing university. Understanding how first-year students manage the stress associated with their transition into university is an important area of research to provide evidence for strategies to enhance student well-being.

Stress, coping and transition into university

Research exploring how students manage their transition into university has typically built on the transactional model of stress and coping (Folkman, Lazarus, Gruen, & DeLongis, 1986). This model focuses on the dynamic relationship between person and environment and distinguishes between the processes of primary appraisal of the threat, secondary appraisal of possible responses to the threat and coping or the execution of the response to the threat. Within this framework, two main coping strategies have been identified: problem-focused coping where a person’s efforts are directed towards the problem that causes stress (e.g. confrontation, social support seeking, planned problem solving), and emotion-focused coping where their efforts are directed towards managing the emotions arising from the stress (e.g. distancing, self-controlling, positive reappraisal, avoidance). Similar distinctions have emerged in a variety of research such as approach and avoidance (Roth & Cohen, 1986), engagement or disengagement (Tobin, Holroyd, Reynolds, & Wigal, 1989) and active or avoidance strategies (Billings & Moos, 1981). While some conceptualisations emphasise the interrelatedness and possible usefulness of both these coping strategies at different stages of coping journey (Folkman & Lazarus, 1985; Horowitz, 1976 as cited in Roth & Cohen, 1986), much work in this area conceptualises problem-focussed coping as effective and stress reducing, while emotion-focussed strategies are seen as potentially effective in stress-reduction in short-term, but not necessarily effective in promoting long-term well-being (Carnicer & Calderón, 2014). For example, Chao (2011) suggested that continual use of avoidant coping may overpower the positive impact of social support and reduce college students’ well-being, while Carnicer and Calderón’s (2014) research showed an inverse relationship between the use of problem-focused strategies and psychological distress among university students.

While this body of literature has focused mostly on individual characteristics of coping and treated coping strategies as located within the individual, recent research has also started to consider how coping as a process is distributed across individuals and their socio-cultural contexts to include the use of various cultural elements and activities. For example, findings of the Stress and Wellbeing in Australia Survey (Australian Psychological Society [APS], 2014) suggested that Australians, irrespective of their age, used cultural elements and activities such as watching TV or movies, spending time with friends or family, listening to music and reading as strategies for managing their stress. Lo’s (2002) longitudinal study of Australian nursing students’ coping strategies also indicated that cultural activities form an important part of students coping strategies. The results of this study suggested that students use problem solving (e.g., realistic goal setting, time management), recreation and sport (e.g., exercising, gardening, listening to music, going to the movies), social support (e.g., talking to family, friends, teaching staff) and tension reduction (e.g., smoking, drinking, crying, meditation) to manage their stress. Lo (2002) conceptualized the first three of those categories as problem focused, while viewing the fourth as emotion focused, and emphasised the effectiveness of the former over the latter. While these kinds of conceptual links between culture use and coping strategies are relatively rare in the available literature, the research that does consider those links seems to build on assumption that culture can be a useful tool for avoidance but not necessarily for approach-oriented coping (see, e.g., Miranda & Claes, 2009; Saarikallio & Erkkilä, 2007). Furthermore, there is very little conceptual work available that would allow understanding why and how cultural elements and activities can function as important resources in the process of coping with stress. There is also a need for conceptual work that explores the assumption that emotion-focused or avoidant coping strategies (that involve cultural elements and activities) are ineffective in promoting long-term well-being and take a more process-oriented perspective that considers the dynamic relationship between problem-focused and emotion-focused coping as serving different purposes in the coping journey. The current paper seeks to address this gap in the literature by building on the conceptualisation of culture and its use in socio-cultural tradition.

Culture, coping and transition into university

In conceptualising culture, we build on the idea that all our experiences of ourselves, of others and of the world are mediated and constituted by the cultural, historical and social contexts in which we live (Valsiner, 2007). This view highlights the idea of semiotic mediation that originates from Vygotsky’s (1978) theorising and focuses on understanding the kinds of mediating systems – tools or signs – that humans use to organise their thinking, feeling and everyday activities (Valsiner, 2012). Thus, we understand culture as a ‘unique organiser of person-environment relations’ (p. 6), where its capacity for active and constructive preadaptation in our anticipated, but unpredictable world is made possible by the open-ended and poly-semiotic nature of cultural tools.

Hasan (2004) and Wertsch (2007) propose that only some of cultural mediation is explicit and clearly visible, as for example when a student attends his first psychology lecture in university and is introduced to Vygotsky’s ideas about semiotic mediation, while the majority of mediation occurs without our conscious awareness in an implicit or invisible manner. The latter refers to instances where culture has gone ‘underground’ (Hasan, 2002) and we cannot point to a particular agent responsible for the mediation, cannot identify the clear purpose for which the mediation is done or recognise at whom the mediation is directed. Nevertheless, important aspects of how we position ourselves in relation to others, how we conceive our pasts or imagine our possible futures and how we think about others and the world around us are constructed through this unintentional and invisible cultural mediation. So the student going to his first psychology lecture learns not only the subject matter, but also what it means to be a (psychology) student, without anyone explicitly explaining to him how to behave or him intentionally trying to learn how to act, feel or think as one.

The distinction between visible and invisible mediation points to an intentional use of culture by self or others. That is, culture does not only work through invisible meditation, but we can also intentionally mediate our experiences in and of the world. Culture, thus enables us to distance ourselves from our immediate experiences and offers us a possibility to create resources of various kinds to act upon ourselves and upon the world beyond us. It is in this intentional act of using culture that culture becomes a resource, a tool, capital, semiotic mediator or artefact (Gillespie & Zittoun, 2010). Cornejo (2010) suggests that we can talk of the use of culture when ‘there is an agent with a certain purpose, whose action converts […] something into an instrument’ (p. 65). That is, culture is not a tool or a resource in itself, but only when ‘it is part of a purposeful action performed by somebody’ (Cornejo, 2010, p. 65).

Gillespie and Zittoun (2010) suggest that there are different ways or modes of using culture as a resource. In particular, they point to two modes: reflective and non-reflective use of culture, where the former describes the case where the actor is focusing on the resource and its use, and the latter refers to the situation where the actor focuses solely on the goal of their action. For example, reflective use of culture refers to a situation where a student who struggles to fall asleep at night thinking about her upcoming university assignment intentionally creates a playlist of relaxing music to help her to calm down, while non-reflective use refers to a situation where another student simply spends hours listening to whatever music she has available on her device. While making a distinction between these two modes of using culture, Gillespie and Zittoun (2010) emphasise their inter-relatedness. In particular, reflective use of culture is embedded in the ongoing flow of goal-directed action (i.e. non-reflective use) and entails temporary distancing from the immediate task at hand and turning one’s gaze towards the resource and its use in order to then turn the gaze back again to the task possibly in a renewed manner. Reflective use of culture is thus not an end in itself but rather a passing state where the goal-directed action is temporarily suspended and the resource use is foregrounded in order to reignite, renew or restructure one’s ability to engage with and achieve the goal-oriented task at hand. According to Gillespie and Zittoun, it is not necessarily the distinction between the two modes of culture use that should be the focus of investigation, but rather the movement between the two and the transformation from non-reflective to reflective use and back again (see also Gillespie & Zittoun, 2013).

In mapping the different ways of using culture, Gillespie and Zittoun (2010) also discuss the symbolic use of cultural elements. Zittoun (2004) suggests that ‘symbolic resources are cultural elements which are mobilized by a person in a situation [that are] not related to the situation of their internalization, and which the person uses as means in order to do something’ (p. 133). In this conceptualisation, then, symbolic resources are located between the personal and collective meaning fields, where their use builds on the shared value and meaning of the cultural element, but also extends it into personal sphere. In other words, symbolic resources are cultural elements which through use become about something else: about self and one’s social repositioning or reconstruction of identity, about others and sharing experiences with them or about the world more broadly and learning about it or developing a new perspective towards it (Zittoun, 2007b). According to Zittoun (2007a), it is because of this possibility to use culture for other, personally relevant and transformative purposes that people can mobilize elements of culture to deal with difficult life situations such as immigration or transition into university (Zittoun, 2006).

The socio-cultural tradition thus offers valuable conceptual tools for understanding how and why culture with its various elements and activities can function as an important resource in the process of managing potentially stressful life events. This conceptual tradition has been especially valuable in demonstrating the important role culture can play in emotional and identity regulation during transitions (see, e.g., Hale & de Abreu, 2010; Kadianaki, 2014). Similar ideas about the importance of esthetic experiences, such as watching films and using them as ‘equipment for living’ to aid personal growth and development, have also been proposed in neighbouring theoretical traditions (seee.g., Young, 2000). From this body of research, it is clear how culture can be used as important resource in the approach-oriented or problem-focused coping, yet there is less conceptual work that would allow understanding how culture can become an important resource in avoidance-oriented or emotion-focused coping. Furthermore, as mentioned above, Gillespie and Zittoun (2010) emphasise that the importance of distinguishing between different modes of using culture lies in the possibility of conceptualising the movement and dynamic relationship between the modes. Yet theoretical and empirical work that would build on this idea and take a more process-oriented approach remains to be scarce. The current paper seeks to address this gap in the literature by discussing results from a recent study that explored the culture use of first-year students transitioning into their university studies.

Current study

The current study was guided by two broad research questions to conceptually explore the idea that culture can be used in various ways in the process of managing transition into university: (a) What kind of cultural elements and activities do students use to manage their transition into university? (b) How do students use these cultural elements and activities to manage their transition into university?

The study utilised a cross-sectional survey-based design and in opting for this design, various opportunities and limitations were carefully considered. On the one hand, it was anticipated that using a larger sample and keeping the focus of the study broadly on culture use would provide an opportunity to explore a range of different ways culture could be used in a transition process. Furthermore, it was acknowledged that using a somewhat larger sample size would offer an opportunity to use data analysis techniques that could reveal underlying dimensions in the participants’ use of culture. On the other hand, it was acknowledged that culture use is a highly personal and idiosyncratic experience that might be challenging to capture in a survey-based study where the possibilities to seek clarification are very limited. Furthermore, the challenges of gathering data through open-ended questions that required at least some level of reflection in order to provide answers were recognised. In order to address these challenges, a decision was made to design a questionnaire that would combine closed-ended and open-ended questions and thus allow using both quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques. ¹ Furthermore, the questionnaire was designed so that, on the one hand, it guided the participants to think about their culture use broadly, while on the other hand, it also helped them to reflect on those instances where they had used culture in a symbolic manner to aid their personal growth and development. In order to achieve this latter goal, the questionnaire included a short vignette that aimed to facilitate the reflection on the symbolic use of culture (see Table 1). The questionnaire and its different sections are described in the next section.

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Table 1.

Vignette used in the questionnaire.

Please read the following paragraph carefully, before commencing on answering the questions in this section.

This story is about Julie. She always knew of the band Manic Street Preachers. However, she didn’t become interested in their music until a friend started discussing the disappearance of one of the band members. Julie went on the Internet to find out more about this story. Since then, she started buying Manic Street Preachers’ albums and often listens to their music. Perhaps it was the disappearance of the band member and the song they wrote about that, but something about their music really connected with Julie when her grandmother passed away. Julie now often listens to Manic Street Preachers’ music when she is going through something big in her life. For example, when she first moved to Melbourne to study, Julie would often listen to their music. She felt that their song about new cities really reflected what she was going through moving to Melbourne, both the great stuff of an exciting new city and some of the harder parts, like not knowing where anything is. When Julie started her first romantic relationship, she worried about her weight and appearance and what her new boyfriend thought of her. But then she would think of the song “She is suffering” by Manic Street Preachers, and it would remind her that those supermodel-looking skinny girls were not better than she was. This song really helped Julie to feel good about herself and enjoy her new relationship.

Julie’s story demonstrates how cultural materials, experiences and activities (e.g. watching films, reading books, listening to music) can become meaningful resources that can really help us with big things or changes in our life. NOT just listening to music while you wash up, or in the car or watching TV at the end of the day to simply feel relaxed; but rather those songs, movies, books, activities you really identify with or have an emotional connection with, which can really be a meaningful resource that you call on or use in some way when something big is happening in your life.

Now, we would like to invite you to think about and share your experiences of some of the things that have meaning to you. Please take a minute to think about any meaningful songs, activities, movies or other experiences that you connect with and that have helped you in any way since you started university.

Method

Questionnaire

The development of the questionnaire was inspired by instruments used in previous studies (Grossen, Baucal, & Zittoun, 2010; Stankovic, Baucal, & Zittoun, 2009; Zittoun, 2007b). The questionnaire started with demographic questions which were followed by the vignette (see Table 1) that aimed to guide the students to thinking about their culture use, especially their symbolic use of culture.

The main body of the questionnaire consisted of four sections dedicated to exploring the use of culture. The first and second sections sought to explore what cultural elements and activities students used to manage their transition into university; the third section explored how students used these elements and activities while the fourth section further explored the reasons why the students used these elements and activities.

In the first section, 24 cultural elements or activities were listed for participants to rate how frequently they had used each of these as they started university on a 4-point Likert scale with ‘not applicable’ as an additional option (0 = not applicable, 1 = never, 4 = very often), and how important each element or activity was for them in general (0 = not applicable, 1 = not at all important, 4 = very important) (see Table 2 for the list of cultural elements and activities). These 24 cultural elements and activities were chosen based on Grossen and colleagues’ (2010) original questionnaire. Five items were removed as they were not directly relevant to the university context (e.g. ‘doing homework, working for school’); five items were reworded to better capture a breath of cultural elements (e.g. ‘reading newspapers and magazines to get informed’ into ‘reading’) and five items were added to capture the use of reflection as a possible resource (e.g. ‘reflecting on personal past experiences’).

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Table 2.

Students’ use of culture – frequency and importance.

	Frequency		Importance
	Never/ sometimes	Often/very often	Not at all important/slightly important	Somewhat important/very important
1. Writing	89.7	10.3	77.7	22.3
2. Reading	62.5	37.5	47.8	52.1
3. Listening to music	9.8	90.3	12	88
4. Going to theatre	94	5.9	84.8	15.2
5. Reading comics	94	5.4	94.6	5.4
6. Internet	27.2	72.9	45.1	54.9
7. Watching TV	37.5	62.5	45.1	54.8
8. Video games	88	11.9	87.5	12.5
9. Watching films	48.9	51.1	52.2	47.8
10. Doing arts and crafts	85.9	14.1	73.4	26.6
11. Making a collection	92.9	7.1	92.4	7.6
12. Working on one blog	87.5	12.5	85.3	14.7
13. Redecorating living environment	78.3	21.7	62	38
14. Doing sports	56	44	39.2	60.8
15. Participate in associations	92.4	7.6	87.5	12.5
16. Religious community	92.4	7.6	82.1	18
17. Care of another person	80.5	19.6	52.7	47.3
18. Care of pet or pets	62	38	44.5	55.4
19. Care of plants	93.5	6.5	88.6	11.4
20. Reflect on personal past experiences	42.9	57.1	34.2	65.7
21. Reflect on personal experiences of life changes	44	56	38	62
22. Reflect on other’s experiences	61.4	38.6	54.3	45.6
23. Reflect on other’s experiences of life changes	70.7	29.4	60.3	39.7
24. Reflect on own past experiences similar to university	68	32.1	60.8	39.2

The second section allowed participants to provide other examples of cultural elements or activities that they had used in their transition to university in addition to the ones listed in the first section. Again, participants were asked to rate how frequently they had used each element/activity since starting their university studies on 4-point Likert scale with ‘not applicable’ as an additional option (0 = not applicable, 1 = never, 4 = very often) and how important each element/activity was for them in general (0 = not applicable, 1 = not at all important, 4 = very important).

In the third section, participants were asked to think about the cultural elements and activities mentioned in previous sections and to list the three that they had used the most over the past three months, and then, answer to open-ended questions, describing in detail how these cultural elements and activities were useful to them.

Finally, the fourth section was designed to further investigate the purpose of using these cultural elements and activities for the participants during their university transition. This part of the questionnaire was based on a scale used by Grossen and colleagues (2010). Based on the feedback received in a pilot study, their original 12 items were reworded slightly, and one extra item was added (see the final set of statements in Table 3). Participants were asked to rate the extent each statement applied to them over the past three months, while thinking about the cultural elements and activities mentioned in previous sections. Participants responded using a 4-point Likert-scale (1 = did not apply to me at all, 4 = applied to me very much, or most of the time).

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Table 3.

Factor loadings for of the statements exploring purposes of using culture.

Item	Initial factor loading	Final factor loading
Factor 1: Engagement		α = 0.85
These resources/activities help me understand where I stand in my current life	0.81	0.79
These resources/activities prompt and encourage me to think about my future	0.80	0.76
These resources/activities teach me to see people differently	0.69	0.74
These resources/activities make me become conscious of my feelings	0.73	0.73
I understand myself better thanks to these resources/activities	0.73	0.70
These resources/activities are a way of discovering new things	0.65	0.70
These resources/activities help to provide clarity and guide my decision making	0.58	0.62
Factor 2: Withdrawal		α = 0.74
These resources/activities enable me to escape from everyday troubles	0.85	0.85
These resources/activities cheer me up	0.79	0.81
These resources/activities are a good means of forgetting what happens in my life	0.78	0.77
Factor 3: Reverse items (removed from further analysis)
These resources/activities do not change anything in my way of seeing things	0.85
These resources/activities do not influence my life choices	0.82
Item with high cross-loadings (removed from further analysis): These resources/activities are part of my personality

α = Cronbach’s alpha.

Results

Discussion

This conceptual paper explored the purposes of using culture in the process of coping with stressful situations by looking at the particular case of first-year students’ transition into university. The aim was to examine what kinds of cultural elements and activities students use and how they use these to aid their transition into university. Further, this paper aimed to add to the literature linking culture use and coping strategies and how cultural elements and activities can function as important resources in the process of coping with stress.

The results of the study showed that there was a consistent pattern in the students’ use of culture, where those cultural elements and activities that were most frequently used, were also considered as most important. In particular, the results showed that music, Internet and TV were most often used, and rated as most important, by first-year university students. These findings resonate with the trend in Australian general population to use TV, movies and music as strategies for managing stress (APS, 2014) and relate also to the results from Grossen and colleagues’ (2010) examination of high school students’ uses of culture, who also found that popular culture such as music, using the computer and watching TV were the most frequently used and important resources for the students.

The exploration of students’ purposes of using culture suggested a range of purposes for which culture can be used in the process of coping with stress associated with the transition to university. First, the study allowed making a distinction between using culture for withdrawal purposes as opposed to engagement purposes, and second, it pointed to a further distinction between three ways of engagement: mood management (i.e. using culture to manage emotions arising from stressful situations), learning (i.e. using culture to gain new knowledge about self and others) and personal interaction (i.e. using culture to deal with the isolation and disconnection that can arise from stressful experiences). The two distinctions proposed in this paper echo those identified by other researchers. First, the distinction between withdrawal and engagement clearly corresponds to that between avoidant or emotion-focused and approach- or problem-focused coping strategies as identified in stress and coping literature (Folkman et al., 1986). While seemingly unsurprising, this finding is nevertheless important in addition to the existing literature as it allows conceptualising culture as an important resource in both emotion-focused and problem-focused coping. On the one hand, these findings add to the coping and stress literature that seems to be based on the assumption that cultural elements and activities can mostly function as resources for avoidance (see also Miranda & Claes, 2009) as it provides evidence that culture can be an important resource also in problem-focused coping. On the other hand, it also makes a conceptual contribution to the socio-cultural literature, especially that building on symbolic resources framework where the explicit emphasis has mainly been on the importance of culture use in problem-focused coping (see, e.g., Zittoun, 2006), as it shows how culture can be an important tool also for avoidance. The recognition that culture can be used as a resource in both kinds of coping strategies thus creates a useful link between two otherwise rather disconnected bodies of research.

Second, the finding that culture can be used for withdrawal, mood management, learning and personal interaction purposes corresponds to some earlier typologies that have explored the use of culture. For example, the distinction between learning and personal interaction resonates with Zittoun’s (2007b) suggestion that culture use can be about self (i.e. learning about one’s identity), about others (i.e. interacting with others) or about the world more broadly (i.e. gaining new knowledge). This four-fold distinction also resembles Lonsdale and North’s (2011) findings about people’s reasons for listening to music as they differentiate between five distinct motivations: (a) surveillance (i.e. the need to be aware of what is going on in the world), (b) personal identity (i.e. the need to know who one is), (c) interpersonal relationships (i.e. the need to interact with others), (d) diversion (i.e. need to escape, relax and be entertained) and (e) mood management (i.e. regulating positive and negative emotions). As mentioned earlier, it is not suggested here that the proposed categorisation is exhaustive, but rather it is seen as indicative of the variety of purposes people use culture as part of their coping strategies. As such, the findings point to the need to move beyond a mere distinction between emotion-focused and problem-focused strategies and rather consider what kinds of transformations the culture use facilitates in a person’s relationship with themselves, with others or with the wider world. The needed conceptual work would thus need to consider not only the differences in coping strategies, but should also examine the ways people interpret and appraise the stressful situation (i.e. the threat) and how they see it affecting their ways of feeling, think and acting as a basis for understanding their coping strategies.

While the current exploratory study did not examine the effectiveness of different coping strategies and ways of using culture, the results nevertheless raise some important conceptual questions about the way the effectiveness of coping strategies has been conceptualised in the relevant literature. In short, the stress and coping literature views emotion-focused coping strategies as ineffective and problem-focused strategies as effective in promoting long-term well-being. The results of the current study, however, seem to suggest that people do not use different strategies in isolation, but rather they move and shift between these as they use different cultural elements and activities for different purposes. Building on the results of the current study, it thus seems that the assumption about the ineffectiveness of avoidant strategies may need to be examined from a view which considers the dynamic relationship between approach and avoidant coping and the distinct purposes they may serve in the process of managing stress. Gillespie and Zittoun (2010) propose that from the point of view of development, it is important to understand how and why individuals move between reflective and non-reflective uses of culture. Similarly, it is suggested here that in order to understand how coping with stress leads to personal change and transformation, we need a model of coping where withdrawal and engagement are conceptualised as working in tandem, as people shift in and out of those ways of dealing with stress in their coping journey. This kind of process-oriented model would allow identifying patterns in the way people fluctuate back and forth between withdrawal and different ways of engagement that support and facilitate their personal growth and development. While the current study has made some important conceptual groundwork for the development of such a model, the future studies should further explore this proposal building on appropriate empirical evidence.

In sum, while being conceptual and exploratory in nature, this study has raised some interesting questions and proposed some possible answers for thinking about the complex ways how people use culture to manage stressful situations. It is our hope that the proposed conceptual tools will be scrutinised and further developed in future theoretical and empirical work.