INSTRUCTOR-FACILITATED AUDIOVISUAL MEDIA IN MENTAL HEALTH EDUCATION: A RESEARCH PROPOSAL FOR A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY AMONG FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS AT SHANGRAO NORMAL UNIVERSITY, CHINA

Abstract

This paper proposes a quasi-experimental study to examine how structured, instructor-facilitated exposure to audiovisual media affects mental health literacy, emotional resilience, and help-seeking behaviour among first-year students at Shangrao Normal University (SNU), China. Mental health concerns among Chinese university students have grown at a measurable pace, yet dominant lecture-based curricula remain poorly suited to the emotional complexity of psychological education. Audiovisual media offers a theoretically grounded alternative, but rigorous quantitative evidence from Chinese higher education settings remains scarce. A cross-sectional, quasi-experimental design with pre-test and post-test assessments across an eight-week media-integrated curriculum module is proposed for the 2025 academic year. A 45-item Likert-scale instrument was developed and pilot-tested with 50 first-year students at SNU. The pilot returned Cronbach's alpha values ranging from 0.871 to 0.908, a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of 0.84, and a four-factor structure explaining 59.2% of total variance. The main study will recruit a stratified random sample of approximately 322 first-year students. Four hypotheses are advanced, testing whether audiovisual media raises mental health literacy relative to a control group, whether instructor facilitation mediates emotional resilience gains, whether unstructured media consumption predicts anxiety, and whether media type produces differential literacy outcomes. Analyses will use SPSS 26.0 and SmartPLS 4.0. This study is among the first to apply a validated quantitative instrument to audiovisual mental health education in a Chinese normal university context, with explicit attention to instructor facilitation as a mediating mechanism and cultural resonance as a selection