Psychological safety of Russian and Chinese students living in the campus dormitory

Higher education is supposed to create a safe psychological environment for students, which is necessary for rapid adaptation, comfort of learning and personal development. However, there is a lot of literature on psychological safety, empirical studies are lacking at present. Our study is aimed at describing the personal component of psychological safety in risk groups and revealing the cultural effect in the perception of the educational environment in students, living in a dormitory, including foreigners. The method included a survey of 61 Russian and 62 Chinese students of Perm State University. We used the personality autonomy questionnaire to study the relationship between personality and environment. The attitude to the environment was measured using a spatial semantic differential. We have developed a questionnaire for registering cultural affiliation. The findings show that environment attitude is related to the student’s ability to create trusting, close relationships with people. The relationships quality is a connecting element in the structure of psychological safety for Chinese students. Russian students also assess environment safety by reliability category. It was revealed that person autonomy is connected with the attitude and perception to safe of space. Cultural differences allow students to identify different criteria for evaluating a space as psychologically safe.

psychological safety, university environment, dormitory, cultural characteristics, semantic assessment, personal psychological space