Psychological resilience in the association between community-engaged rural art practice and university students’ well-being and distress: a cross-sectional study

Community-engaged rural art practice (CERAP) combines rural field investigation, community interaction, cultural interpretation, collaborative design, creative intervention, and reflective learning. This cross-sectional study examined whether CERAP was associated with psychological well-being and distress and whether psychological resilience statistically accounted for indirect associations. A convenience sample of 625 university students from three universities in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China (61.6% female; age 18–23 years, M = 20.19, SD = 1.26) completed a 12-item study-specific CERAP measure, the 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC-10), the WHO-5 Well-Being Index, and the 21-item Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-21).

Split-sample factor analyses supported a unidimensional CERAP score (Cronbach’s α = 0.773; confirmatory CFI = 0.997, RMSEA = 0.009). CERAP was positively correlated with resilience (r = 0.43) and well-being (r = 0.44) and negatively correlated with depression (r = − 0.44), anxiety (r = − 0.24), and stress (r = − 0.43). Adjusted regressions showed corresponding associations, and bootstrap analyses identified significant indirect associations through resilience, accounting for 36.0–79.7% of the total associations across outcomes.

These findings provide preliminary evidence of cross-sectional associations; the convenience sample and observational design preclude causal or temporal inference. They support further evaluation of community-engaged art/design curricula in relation to student well-being. This study was supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Education and Teaching Reform Project “Art-Based Rural Revitalization: Reform and Practice of Design Talent Training With Rural Characteristics” (Grant No.

College of Arts and Design, Ningbo University of Finance and Economics, Ningbo, Zhejiang, China The authors declare no competing interests. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material.

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To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Psychological resilience in the association between community-engaged rural art practice and university students’ well-being and distress: a cross-sectional study. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-69593-1 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-69593-1