Students’ Academic Lifestyle in COVID-19 Crisis: A Qualitative Study with a Phenomenological Analysis

COVID-19 crisis has created special educational conditions. This challenge has brought about changes in students’ academic lifestyles.

We aimed to conduct a qualitative study on the students’ academic lifestyle and quality during the COVID-19 crisis.

This is a qualitative method with a phenomenological analysis. The research was conducted within the framework of logic sampling on 50 students with a phenomenological approach to Medical, Health, and Laboratory Sciences students. It was purposeful. Students were asked to describe the style and quality of their academic life in the form of expression of experience during their COVID-19 crisis and quarantine, and then the analysis of the students’ written work was performed using Colaizzi’s seven-step process. Four-dimension criteria were also considered to assess rigor of qualitative research (credibility, dependability, conformability, and transferability).

Of 64 codes obtained in the research, five themes and 11 sub-themes emerged. Themes included items such as 1) unknown stress and anxiety, vague future and professional problem, 2) cognitive burden (information literacy, bulk contents, need for self-paced, and need for mastery), 3) interests (following interest and compensation process), 4) skills (self-regulation, self-direction, and time management), and 5) security (available content, exercise, and practice).

According to the results, it can be stated that changing the academic lifestyle can provide improved personal skills and information literacy, but changing the academic lifestyle in a negative direction with cognitive burden and fear of the unknown has created many problems in the process of this lifestyle.