How and When Resilience can Boost Student Academic Performance: A Weekly Diary Study on the Roles of Self-Regulation Behaviors, Grit, and Social Support

Resilience has been found to have positive impacts on college students’ well-being and mental health. However, we still lack knowledge on how and under what conditions resilience can help to facilitate college students’ academic performance. Based on the conservation of resources theory, this study investigated how resilience could be positively linked to college students’ academic performance through increasing self-regulation behaviors, and to what extent this indirect effect could be strengthened by individual grit and social support. Using 74 Chinese college students with a four-week longitudinal survey (296 observations in total), we confirmed our hypotheses. The results of multilevel moderated mediation showed that weekly self-regulation behaviors mediated the positive relationship between weekly resilience and college students’ weekly academic performance and that this positive indirect effect became stronger for those who had a higher level of grit and perceived a higher level of social support. Further, we found that weekly resilience was also positively related to the next week’s self-regulation behaviors, which in turn, increased next week’s academic performance. Social support can strengthen such a carry-over impact of resilience on next week’s self-regulation behaviors (but not for grit). To conclude, our study uncovered the short-term fluctuations of resilience and its impacts on students’ study outcomes. We highlight the important roles of personal resources (grit) and social resources (social support) that can leverage the positive effects of resilience on students’ weekly basis.