INVESTIGATION OF SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL LIFE AND GENDER DIFFERENCES OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA AND CROATIA DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The COVID-19 pandemic as accurately a historical and unique event causing a paradigm shift in ways how we live but also how business function. In addition to the health system, the education system was the first "under treat" since the beginning of the pandemic. Universities were forced to completely switch to remote teaching that was later characterized as "emergency remote teaching". Parallel to this, governments imposed severe measures of distancing among everyone, including both students and staff. This has brought numerous changes to students' lives. Thus, the main aim of this paper is to investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the social and emotional life of university students in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Croatia. For this purpose, the article uses data available from a comprehensive Global Student Survey "Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Life of Higher Education Students" which was carried out among 30 000 higher education students coming from 129 countries during the period May - June 2020 via the open-source web. The Survey was conducted through two waves however since data on BiH is available only from the first wave, the paper employs the dataset from the first one. Thus, Bill's sample includes 409 responses while Croatian sample includes 673 responses. Gender and field of study effect is significant in few segments i.e., female students tend to be more worried about certain issues. Students of natural and technical sciences tend to feel significantly more hopeful and ashamed compared to their colleagues who were studying arts and social sciences. This paper also provides recommendations for education authorities and other relevant stakeholders for improving student's engagement and their mental health and well-being.