INVESTIGATING THE EFFECTS OF COMMUNICATION CHANNELS AND INTERGROUP CONTACT ON COLLEGE STUDENTS’ MENTAL HEALTH

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2022

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Abstract

The prevalence and severity of mental health issues among students have increased on college campuses in recent years. Online counseling can provide a good way to improve college students’ mental health, but the amount of social presence of online counseling types may impact its effectiveness. Moreover, communication challenges may arise when the counselors and clients are from different racial groups, and these challenges may in turn be impacted by the characteristics of the communication channel. Using an experiment with 292 participants, this study investigated how counseling channels and inter/intragroup contact, as well as their interaction, affect counseling effectiveness (state anxiety, self-disclosure, satisfaction, and working alliance) and intergroup outcomes (intergroup prejudice and intergroup anxiety) as well as the moderation effects of communication competence and stigma. The results indicated that videoconferencing counseling had a higher satisfaction than online synchronous chat counseling. Intergroup counseling significantly reduced intergroup prejudice and intergroup anxiety. Participants’ self-disclosure, satisfaction, working alliance, reduced intercultural prejudice, and reduced intercultural anxiety significantly decreased their state anxiety. Implications of these findings for intergroup communication in online counseling are discussed.

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