Research Spotlight: Making Student Wellbeing Part of Higher Education

That question drives Johnnie Yang’s dissertation, “What Are We Doing About the Student Wellness Crisis?” The study develops and validates a multidimensional measure of holistic wellbeing and examines how students experience a credit-bearing yoga-based seminar that integrates movement, breathwork, meditation, journaling, and reflection.

We spoke with Johnnie Yang of the University of California, Los Angeles, to learn more about measuring wellbeing across eight dimensions, addressing equity gaps, and using the curriculum as a scalable form of support. The dissertation combines psychometric evidence with students’ own accounts of stress, identity, relationships, values, and personal transformation.

Student wellness is often measured through clinical symptoms or service use. This dissertation argues that those indicators are necessary but incomplete. Financial strain, cultural identity, spirituality, work and career questions, learning, physical experience, and campus environment also shape whether students feel able to thrive.

The research also addresses an access problem. Counseling-centered models are underused by many first-generation, low-income, queer, disabled, and racially minoritized students. A credit-bearing course can bring wellbeing practices into an ordinary academic setting rather than waiting for students to seek specialized help during a crisis.

Johnnie Yang reflected on the broader significance of the study: “I want to be really clear about something first: this isn’t about everyone being well all the time. That’s not realistic and honestly it’s not the goal. We have good days, we have bad days, that’s just life, that’s just college. What I’m actually interested in is awareness, like, do students have the language and the tools to notice where they’re at and navigate it, in every part of their life, not just when things fall apart. So for institutions, I think the implication is less ‘fix the crisis’ and more ‘build population-level health promotion into the actual student experience.’ Curriculum is a scalable lever for that. You can’t put every student in a counselor’s office, but you can put wellbeing into a course that hundreds of students take.”

The dissertation makes three connected contributions to wellbeing research and higher education practice.

• The How Are You Survey supported a multidimensional model. Data from 251 full-time undergraduates provided evidence for eight related dimensions of wellbeing and identified meaningful differences associated with first-generation status, income, sexual orientation, and disability or health condition status.
• Different dimensions related to different student outcomes. Regression analyses linked aspects of wellbeing with academic performance, belonging, persistence, and campus satisfaction. A single total score could conceal important differences in how students experience college life.
• The yoga-based seminar gave students practical tools and a language for reflection. Eighteen first-year participants described applying movement, breathwork, meditation, journaling, self-awareness, and emotional regulation beyond class. The course fostered embodied application, developing awareness, and personal transformation.

Looking back on the mixed-methods findings, Johnnie said: “The finding that surprised me most was that physical wellbeing came out as the lowest scoring dimension in my survey sample, just barely under psychological (mental and emotional) wellbeing. Students were not rating themselves as highly on sleep, diet, exercise, self-care, and satisfaction with their own physical health. And then physical wellbeing turned out to be a significant predictor of GPA. So it’s not just that students were overlooking their physical needs, but that this overlooking may be affecting their academic performance. This finding reinforced my belief that a strong mind belongs in a strong body and that students require tools to cultivate both.

“And then the qualitative strand actually gave me a real-world version of this finding. I scheduled the yoga seminar for 9am on Mondays, on purpose, and a lot of students told me they were afraid of that, something like, ‘there’s no way I’m functional that early.’ But having to physically show up at that time ended up motivating them to build healthier sleep habits, to actually move their bodies regularly, and to prepare their mind and body for learning throughout the rest of the week. So the quantitative data was telling me physical wellbeing matters for outcomes like academic performance, and the students were living out exactly that connection in real time, without me having to tell them.

“I’ll also say, all the holistic wellbeing dimensions were significantly correlated to each other, but not every dimension predicts every outcome. Only some do, and figuring out which ones actually move the needle on GPA, belonging, persistence, and campus satisfaction is a process that should be shaping how institutions spend their time and money.”

The dissertation used a convergent mixed-methods design. The quantitative strand developed and validated the How Are You Survey using data from 251 full-time undergraduate students. Analyses included exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis with ordinal indicators, reliability testing, measurement invariance across key groups, group comparisons, and regressions linking wellbeing dimensions with student outcomes.

The qualitative strand drew on weekly reflection journals and 30- to 60-minute semi-structured interviews from 18 first-year students in a yoga-based seminar. Quantitative and qualitative results were analyzed separately and integrated through narrative weaving to examine confirmation, expansion, and discordance across the two evidence streams.

The dissertation used AILYZE, now known as Evidano, to support the organization, initial coding, and preliminary synthesis of student journals and interview transcripts. The author conducted three analyses: journals alone, interviews alone, and a combined dataset.

Structured prompts incorporated the eight predetermined wellbeing dimensions and course concepts such as self-awareness, emotional regulation, real-life application, and perspective shifts, while remaining open to themes emerging from participants’ language. The platform produced alternative coding structures that the author compared and refined.

The dissertation emphasizes that Evidano functioned as a thought partner rather than an independent analytical authority. Johnnie Yang repeatedly read the journals, manually reviewed transcripts, checked nuances and counterexamples, and made all final interpretations through reflexive thematic analysis and abductive reasoning.

Johnnie also noted how AI tools can support careful research workflows when used responsibly: “So, context that people don’t always get from reading a dissertation: I did this alone. I designed the course, I designed the survey, I recruited over 250 students basically by walking into lecture halls and asking professors if I could have five minutes to pitch it. This was all part of my IRB-approved protocol for recruitment. Keep in mind this was not a funded lab with a team; it was me and a lot of dedication and a lot of emails. Some people take ten years on a dissertation, but I did all of that, plus a full mixed-methods analysis, in about a year.

“Evidano came in on the qualitative side, helping me organize and get an initial read on a huge amount of journal and interview data. I was also the instructor for these students, so I already had relationships and instincts going in, which meant I couldn’t just take the tool’s output at face value. I went back to every transcript myself, checked it against what I actually knew about these students, looked for the stuff that didn’t fit the pattern. So no, using it and being transparent about it didn’t lower the quality of the work. If anything it’s part of why I could do this scope of project solo, in a year, and still have some kind of life and wellbeing of my own left at the end of it. Which, considering the topic of my dissertation, felt like it mattered.”

For institutional leaders, the dissertation supports moving from reactive, counseling-centered responses toward a broader ecosystem in which wellbeing is measured, discussed, and cultivated through curriculum, policy, learning environments, and equitable support.

For educators, the yoga-based seminar shows how contemplative practices can become academic learning rather than an optional extracurricular activity. The course gave students repeated opportunities to connect theory with their bodies, emotions, relationships, and daily decisions.

For researchers, the work provides an initial instrument that now requires validation across institutions, regions, and more diverse populations. It also calls for longitudinal and comparative research on wellness requirements, contemplative curricula, and the durability of student outcomes.

Johnnie offered this takeaway for educators and institutional leaders: “I believe there’s an opportunity to shift from treating wellbeing as something we respond to once it becomes a crisis, toward treating it as something we actively promote. That doesn’t mean pulling back on counseling centers or crisis protocols, those need to stay funded and strong. But we already have ways to measure wellbeing seriously, and we know students respond when given the chance. My yoga course counted toward degree requirements and filled up because students wanted it, not because anyone was mandated into it. So my hope is leaders start treating curriculum as a lever that can move population health at scale, for everyone, not just the students who show up in crisis.”

The dissertation ultimately argues that wellbeing already shapes students’ capacity to learn, connect, and persist. The institutional choice is whether higher education will support it deliberately.