Knowing Myself for Real: Exploring the Self-Care Strategies of Residential Undergraduate HBCU Black Men Implemented During the COVID-19 Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, residence halls at colleges and universities were emptied except for a few lone students. While research has documented how these students experienced isolation and stress, this paper specifically explores how five undergraduate Black men living in residence halls spent their time and engaged in self-care as well as psychosocial development. In this qualitative paper, we use Chickering and Reisser’s third vector of identity development, “moving through autonomy towards interdependence,” as a conceptual framework to understand how our study sample created independent spaces and engaged in self-discovery as a response to the isolation. Implications are relevant to researchers and housing practitioners.