Written Strength: Evaluating Self-Affirmation Notes as an Intervention for Academic Resilience Among Nursing Students

Abstract

Academic resilience is especially relevant in demanding professional programs where students must manage sustained academic workloads, performance expectations, and emerging clinical responsibilities. This study evaluated written self-affirmation notes as a brief behavioral intervention for academic resilience among second-year nursing students. Thirty participants were recruited through convenience sampling and randomly assigned to an experimental condition that completed daily self-affirmation writing or a control condition that completed neutral descriptive writing. Both groups performed the assigned task for approximately 3-5 minutes daily over five days. Academic resilience was measured using the 30-item Academic Resilience Scale at pre-test, post-test, and follow-up. Across the full sample, mean resilience scores increased from pre-test (M = 2.29, SD = 0.24) to post-test (M = 2.51, SD = 0.43) and remained higher at follow-up (M = 2.55, SD = 0.42). The inferential analysis evaluated paired changes across measurement periods after pooling the experimental and control groups. Consequently, the observed improvement cannot be attributed specifically to self-affirmation. The findings nevertheless demonstrate the feasibility of a low-cost written activity and support further investigation of self-affirmation as a potential behavioral strategy for strengthening academic resilience in demanding educational environments. Because the available analysis does not include a condition-by-time test, treatment-specific efficacy is not claimed.