By Joav Merrick Daniel TL Shek, Xiaoqin Zhu, Diya Dou

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in social distancing and lockdown of businesses and also changed life for university students, who had to stay home and learn online instead of frontal teaching. Especially in Hong Kong university students faced many challenges. One huge challenge here is the small flats many families live in and all of a sudden everybody has to stay home. Students may lack privacy, when they attend online lectures and if there are several children at home, they also compete for computer and Wifi resources. Second, because of city lockdown, the social life of university students was much affected, which may lead to reduced social support and increased conflicts with the family. Third, for many university students, they had to take up part-time work to support their living, but the pandemic made that option impossible. The pandemic also severely restricted the offshore learning opportunities for the students, such as going outbound for work-integration and student exchange programs. In this book we describe a study carried out at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University during January-June 2021 to assess the mental health and well-being of university students during the pandemic. Student surveys and focus group interviews, teacher focus group interviews and key services providers’ stocktaking surveys were conducted to reveal the risk and protective factors of mental health in different contexts.