A New Coping Strategy of College Students' Job-Seeking Stress: A Conceptual Framework for the Bidirectional Effect With Subjective Well-Being

Introduction

Since the beginning of this century, as China's higher education has entered the stage of popular development, the number of Chinese college graduates has risen from 1.14 in 2001 to 9.09 million in 2021. The surge in employment, the gradual improvement of employer requirements and family and social expectations, coupled with the continuous accumulation of the “stock” of previous graduates, has brought about an unprecedented rise in the job-seeking stress of college graduates. Even college students in grades 1-3 have clearly reported the existence of job-seeking stress. Many studies have shown that excessive or long-term pressure is the direct reason for the negative development of College Students' study and life, and job-seeking stress has become the biggest psychological pressure faced by Chinese college students (Yan et al., 2020). How to deal with the increasingly severe employment situation and try our best to reduce the job-seeking stress of college students is a prominent problem in front of colleges and universities, education management departments and even the whole society.

Researchers should see that job-seeking stress comes from many sources. In addition to the macro structural problems and social and cultural background, the micro individual psychological state of college students is an endogenous and more direct force, and it is also a relatively explicit and easy to adjust factor. Some scholars seek the psychological explanatory variables of job-seeking stress from the aspects of personality, attribution, psychological capital and social support. It is worth noting that most of these studies also included the investigation of the research object subjective well-being, but they were mainly treated as the dependent variable of job-seeking stress. In practice, the practitioners of career guidance and mental health counseling in colleges and universities mostly focus on the metacognitive problems such as how to locate and establish the concept of job selection. In short, previous research work has not paid enough attention to the positive role that individual emotion may play in college students' job-seeking stress coping process. Based on the “Broaden-And-Build” theory of positive emotions, a literature study was conducted in which the focus was to construct a conceptual framework of bidirectional interaction to characterize the two-way interaction form and internal mechanism between subjective well-being and job-seeking stress (JSS), which provides a new way to relieve job-seeking stress for Chinese college students.