Well-being and academic outcomes for student veterans: A scoping review
Creators: name: Moeck, Ella
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences

description: The objectives of this scoping review are: (1) to summarize how existing research has examined student veterans’ well-being and academic outcomes, (2) to assess the limitations of this research area to date and (3) to recommend how best to quantitatively assess well-being and academic outcomes. Review question How have student veterans’ well-being and academic outcomes been quantitatively assessed in existing research? Inclusion criteria We will include any study (published, unpublished, grey literature, journal articles, government/agency reports) that has quantitatively assessed variables related to undergraduate or postgraduate student veterans’ well-being or academic outcomes, but not necessarily together. We will include studies with US and non-US samples, making a concerted effort to find non-US samples. We will exclude studies that focus just on online-learning, are purely qualitative, or only include active duty military students. We will include studies that have both online and face-to-face learning components. Types of sources We will include quantitative and mixed method designs written in English. The planned dates of coverage are 2000-2020. We will not consider literature reviews or text and opinion papers. Methods This scoping review will be conducted in accordance with the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews (Peters et al., 2019). Search strategy Our search strategy aims to locate published and unpublished studies. The search terms include US and non-US terminology for the military (e.g., armed forces, defense force) and university (e.g., college, tertiary education). The results of an initial limited search of PsycINFO helped develop a full search strategy for PsycINFO and Education Resources Information Centre (ERIC): Search Strategy 1. Due to finding an unmanageable number of results using the same search terms in Proquest Dissertations and Theses and PubMed, we developed narrower search terms for these databases: Search Strategy 2. Information sources Selected studies will be primarily sourced from comprehensive PsycINFO (Ovid) and ERIC (Proquest) searches (see Search Strategy 1 in attached document). To make the number of search results practically viable, we will use a narrower search strategy (see Search Strategy 2 in attached document) for Proquest Dissertations and Theses Global (Proquest) and PubMed. We will cross-check our results with the reference lists of the four reviews on similar topics (Barry et al., 2014; Borsari et al., 2017; Dyar, 2019; Ghosh et al., 2019) and also run specific searches for non-US studies. Study selection After conducting the database search, we will export all results into Endnote X9 and remove internal (within a database) and external (between databases) duplicates. Two independent raters (one blind to the review’s aims) will screen the studies for inclusion using a two-step process: (1) based on the article’s title and abstract and, for selected articles where the title and abstract provide insufficient information, (2) using the full-text. We will record and report our reasoning for excluding articles at the full-text stage. Disagreements at any stage of the selection process will be resolved by discussion and, where required, with a third reviewer. We will use the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) flowchart (Tricco et al., 2018) to report the results of the search and selection in the final scoping review. Data extraction We will extract information about the sample size, location (US or non-US), learning type (face-to-face only, online and face-to-face), military status (veterans only or veterans and current members), and record whether a comparison group was included and what type of comparison group it was (e.g., civilian students). We will record the components of well-being and academic outcomes in three stages by identifying: (1) which overarching components were assessed (e.g., psychological functioning), (2) which constructs were assessed (e.g., depression symptoms), and (3) which measures were used (e.g., the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale). Finally, we will make note of the key quantitative results in these domains and record the study’s limitations. Data presentation Data will be narratively presented and charted in a table with similar headings to: citation, nationality of sample, sample type (e.g., student veterans vs. non-veteran students, just student veterans), sample size, type of method, well-being component, well-being constructs, well-being measures, academic outcome component, academic outcome constructs, academic outcome measures, key findings, and limitations. In light of these results, we will recommend how to adequately assess well-being and academic outcomes, and the relationship between well-being and academic outcomes, among student veterans. These recommendations will benefit future research in this area and, in turn, inform universities on how best to evaluate programs aimed at supporting student veterans. Funding This scoping review is funded by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs Supporting Younger Veterans grant (DVASYVG 42864) awarded to BW, MT, and AP. The funders had no involvement in the scoping review protocol and will have no involvement in the review process.