Important academic interventions for promoting resilience: The perception of construction management undergraduates

Academic institutions play a prominent role in nurturing resilience skills in their graduates especially in fields, such as construction management (CM), which deal with a challenging work environment. Although resilience is a well-established topic in the literature, there is still a paucity of research that examines the importance of academic resilience interventions in the CM discipline. To address this research gap, this study aims to analyse the importance of academic resilience interventions (ARI) from the perception of CM students. First, the literature on ARIs in relevant contexts was reviewed followed by a quantitative survey to obtain the viewpoints of undergraduates undertaking CM programs in Australia. This paper is based on the survey data collected from 105 undergraduate students from five universities. Applying an exploratory factor analysis (EFA), three latent variables were found: (1) industry engagement; (2) raising awareness; and (3) readiness and empowerment to represent the identified ARIs. An importance analysis using the 2D quadrant method revealed that the ARI measures labelled “site visits,” “role model,” and “self-assessment” from the industry engagement aspect (factor1), “role-playing” from the raising awareness aspect (factor2), and “case study” from the readiness and empowerment aspect (factor3) are the most important ARIs from the perception of students. An independent-samples t-test revealed that there is no significant difference between the perception of male and female students on the importance of each ARI. The study provides an enhanced understanding of resilience interventions that can be leveraged for improving the CM curricula.