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Emotion impact factors and emotion management strategy among quarantined college students as close contacts during COVID-19 epidemic: a qualitative study

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Abstract

This research aimed to explore the emotion impact factors and emotion management strategies for college students quarantined as close contacts during the COVID-19 outbreak by analyzing data collected in real time (Lee et al. in DARPA information survivability conference and exposition II, DISCEX’01, vol 1, pp 89–100, IEEE, 2001), and built an emotion impact factors—emotion management strategies model. This study was undertaken among colleges in Shanghai Omicron wave in 2022, whose scale exceeded the original outbreak in Wuhan. An exploratory qualitative research design was adopted. From March to April in 2022, in-depth interviews were carried out with 54 Chinese college students with an average age of 19.91 years during the quarantine period, who were identified as close contacts by the local Center for Disease Control and were quarantined at designated quarantine centers away from campus. Data was collected during the quarantine period and was analyzed with grounded theory approach. The results revealed that there were two paths of emotion impact factors and the corresponding emotion management strategies. Participants adopted spatial-temporal, self-care, social support and control strategies to solve emotional issues separately, when they were influenced by different cultural emotion impact factors, including spatial-temporal, personal, interpersonal and informational emotion impact factors. They adopted the same four strategies as well when influenced by the biological emotion impact factors of perceived threat and perceived efficacy (see Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4 in the “Results”). These findings contribute to the framework of Hochschild’s concept of emotion management to understand how college students quarantined as close contacts adapted by combining the cultural and biological emotion impact factors, and combining the process of effort and ability aspects of emotion management during quarantine, and to expand on the concept of emotion management in the context of being in isolation for a period of time, especially in a life-stage vulnerable to emotional issues, and have implications for public health practitioners and policymakers.

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Funding

This study was funded by the Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project of Shanghai “Intervention Research on the Internet anxious emotion contagion among College Students from the Perspective of Human-Computer Communication” [grant number:2023BXW004].

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  1. Lin Zhang and Yi Mou are considered as co-first authors.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kexue Road NO.100, 450000, Zhengzhou City, Henan Province, China

    Chen Guo

  2. School of Journalism and Communication, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

    Lin Zhang

  3. School of Media and Communication, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Yi Mou

  4. School of Journalism and Communication, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China

    Chen Guo

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  1. Lin Zhang
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Design, concepts, interviews, data acquisition, data analysis, and original draft: Lin Zhang. Concepts, manuscript revision and review: Yi Mou and Chen Guo. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

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Correspondence to Chen Guo.

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Zhang, L., Mou, Y. & Guo, C. Emotion impact factors and emotion management strategy among quarantined college students as close contacts during COVID-19 epidemic: a qualitative study. Curr Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06076-4

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