Studying in challenging times - a longitudinal study on social work students' situations during the Covid-19 pandemic

The aim of this study is to examine challenges and attitudes towards studying, social support, and personal lives of social work students during the Covid-19 pandemic, and to analyze how their situations have changed over the past few semesters under pandemic conditions. Drawing on a quantitative and qualitative research design, 99 students enrolled in the bachelor's and master's programmes at the school of social work at a Swiss University of Applied Sciences were surveyed over four points in time, starting in the spring semester 2020 and ending in the fall semester 2021. This study identifies being distracted, getting things done and worrying a lot as the main challenges across all analyzed semesters. However, only distraction changed over time. Other changes have been found in the challenges of being alone, planning the day, having no accurate workplace, and technical issues. Moreover, social work students' attitudes toward their studies, as well as their social support, have changed significantly between the spring semester 2020 and the fall semester 2021. At last, there is strong qualitative evidence of a change in the students' perceptions of their personal lives. These findings lead to implications for social work education, which are discussed in the final section.