Remote psychological support in campus aid activities

Abstract

Ibaraki prefecture uniquely organizes campus aide (CA) activities performed mainly by graduate students to provide psychological support for senior high school students with multiple departments. This study evaluated the outcomes of remote CA through computer-mediated communication to identify its operability and implementation challenges based on the hypotheses that: (a) infrastructure development that meets requirements is feasible; but (b) it is difficult for remote CA to provide the same quality of psychological support as face-to-face support. During the remote CA period, there were no issues associated with the communication network, safety, or ethics, and an infrastructure based on a design concept was developed. However, analysis of student staff members’ reports using text mining revealed six challenges: instability of the communication network, speech contention, missing eye contact, psychological resistance to the presentation of each user’s self-image, limited field of view, and limited range of conversation due to the number of PCs. The results supported both hypotheses, while concluding that there is a significant opportunity for CA to listen actively whenever they are involved in a session.