UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ CENTRE FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNSELLING: EMPIRICAL RESEARCH AND POTENTIAL IMPORTANCE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE QUALITYOF STUDENT LIFE

Abstract

Counselling psychology addresses the emotional, social, work, school, andphysical health concerns people may have at different stages in their lives,focusing on typical life stresses and more severe issues with which peoplemay struggle as individuals and as a part of families, groups, and organizations. The increasing rate of psychological problems and their consequencesindicate that student centres that provide psychological assistance have toexist. The pilot project “Psychological counselling centre for students” atthe University of Niš is one of the largest and longest running projects ofthis type among the universities in Serbia. The basic research problem is anattempt to predict the frequency of occurrence of student-related problemsregarding: learning and intellectual functioning, emotional relationships,communication, and social relations based on self – concept, quality offamily communication and emotional intelligence. The sample consisted of400 students from University of Niš. A self-concept scale (Bezinović, 1988)was used to measurethe self-concepts of adolescents,while (primary) fami-ly satisfaction was measured using the Faces IV questionnaire (Olson &Gorrall, 2006). To estimate emotional intelligence, the Emotional Compe-tence Questionnaire was used (Takšić et al., 2006). Almost all the modelswere obtained via the hierarchical regression analysis, and proved to bestatistically significant, so that the percentage of the explained varianceranges from 7.9% when it comes to problems in the sphere of emotionalrelationships, to 24,8% in the sphere of communication and social relations.This means that the models best functioned precisely when it came toexplaining the problem of communication and social functioning amongstudents, even though the percentage of the explained variance of 10,9% inthe case of the problem of studying and intellectual functioning is not negli-gible. The study of potential and significant factors which could have animpact, whether positive or negative, on the mental health of the studentpopulation is and should be an imperative for the scientific and professionalcommunity.