Effects of the Digital Intervention StudentPOWR on the Subjective Wellbeing of Students Studying from Home: a Randomized Wait-List Control Trial

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand to study and work from home has become of great importance. While recent research has provided evidence for the negative influence of remote studying on the mental and physical health of students, less is known about digital well-being interventions to mitigate these effects. This study had two objectives: 1) to assess the effects of the online well-being intervention, StudentPOWR, on the subjective well-being of students studying from home, and 2) to investigate the influence of engagement with the intervention on subjective well-being. This was a non-blind, 3-arm (full access, limited access, and waitlist control) randomized controlled trial (RCT) and took place in March 2021. University students (N = 99) studying remotely in Ireland and the Netherlands were randomly assigned to the full access (N = 36), partial access (N = 30), or waitlist control (N = 33) group for the four-week intervention period. Measures included the SPANE questionnaire for subjective well-being and the DBCI-ES-Ex for engagement with the intervention. Participants in both the full access and the partial access groups improved in their subjective well-being scores from baseline to week 2 compared to the waitlist control group (p = .004, Hedges g equal to 0.4902 - small effect size - and 0.5698 - medium effect size - for the full intervention and partial intervention, respectively). However, post-intervention, participants in the partial intervention – but not in the full access group - showed significantly greater changes in subjective well-being scores compared to those in the waitlist control group. Possible explanations for these results, comparisons with previous studies, and suggestions for future research are explored.