COVID-19 and Maintaining Public Health within Student Community: Moral Difficulties Faced by Students

Abstract

The research was aimed to develop a set of recommendations on maintaining public health within student community. For the practical achievement of the research goal, there were studied: students’ self-perceived health status and their physical and moral reaction to COVID-19; their thoughts while onlooking relatives’ reaction in the conditions of self-isolation, and students’ opinion on new interaction with tutors in frame of online education. This part of the research was carried out from November, 2020 till May, 2021. Respondents were the students of South region of Ukraine, who study disciplines with some risk for public health system, namely, future seafarers and medical workers. In our work we drew on theoretical and practical conclusions made by the American, European and Ukrainian researchers of public health system and of cooperation between a teacher and a student in the conditions of COVID-19 pandemic. The theoretical aspect devoted to specification of such concepts as "public health", "public health within student community", is connected with the practical one, and allows to elaborate the unique research tooling and to reflect its components during a sociological poll with the help of questionnaire analysis. Application part of work is based on an empirical social research of transformations of students’ feelings and opinions under the influence of pandemic, drawing on the analysis of moral difficulties that the students of higher educational institution faced in terms of sudden and drastic change to a remote format of learning being fully separated from an educational group. Recommendations and conclusions are made by the authors in order to safeguard public health within student community.