independence, mental health, first-year university students, South Africa
Abstract
Moving into the world of independence straight from the secondary education context is distressing for most first-year university students. The expectation of independence is abrupt for the aforementioned university students, as they quickly move from being dependent on their caregivers and secondary school educators to being independent in their daily living and learning. This, alongside other factors such as academic factors, psychological factors, social factors, and lifestyle factors, compromise the well-being and mental health of these students. The proposed study aimed to investigate the effect that abrupt independence and transitioning to tertiary education had on the mental health of first-year undergraduate students in South African universities. For the proposed study, the researchers conducted a scoping review, with the guidance of the authors Arksey and O’Malley’s methodological framework (2005). The proposed study made use of the PRISMA-scR for data charting and accessed the following online databases: Sage Journals, Taylor and Francis, ScienceDirect, EbscoHost, Google Scholar, and the University of Western Cape’s online database ‘uKwazi’. This research intended to map the key issues of abrupt independence on first-year university students for early intervention development at the secondary school level and to identify any gaps in the literature. Approval for the proposed scoping study was obtained from the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee (HSSREC) of the University of the Western Cape.