NARMA Languishing Among Residence Mentors and Tutors: Flourishing and Languishing in a South African Peer-Support Ecosystem

Residence mentors and tutors occupy an important but comparatively underexamined position within university wellbeing systems. They remain students while simultaneously being entrusted with supporting the academic, social, and developmental participation of others. This study examined flourishing and NARMA languishing among 761 consenting respondents drawn predominantly from residence mentor and tutor roles at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Data were collected between 17 February and 21 March 2026. Participants completed a 10-item brief flourishing-languishing continuum comprising five indicators of flourishing, Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment/Progress, alongside five directly framed indicators of NARMA languishing, Negativity, Apathy, Restricted Relationships, Meaninglessness, and Adversity Preoccupation. Overall flourishing was M = 2.88 (SD = .54, α = .780), while NARMA languishing was M = 1.65 (SD = .61, α = .799). Flourishing and NARMA languishing were substantially inversely associated, r = -.554, 95% CI [-.602, -.503], p < .001. Crucially, inverse correspondence varied systematically across conceptually related indicators. Positive Emotion-Negativity showed the weakest association, r = -.255, whereas Meaning-Meaninglessness showed the strongest, r = -.531. Engagement-Apathy, Relationships-Restricted Relationships, and Accomplishment/Progress-Adversity Preoccupation formed an intermediate cluster. Formal comparisons of dependent correlations confirmed this differentiated pattern, which remained substantively unchanged in a sensitivity analysis restricted to 744 respondents explicitly classified as mentors, tutors, or both. The overall flourishing-languishing association was also statistically indistinguishable from that previously observed among incoming South African first-year students, r = -.558. The findings suggest that flourishing and languishing are substantially related without being uniformly oppositional across psychological domains. For universities, they underscore a reciprocal principle: students entrusted with supporting the flourishing of others should not be assumed to be free from languishing themselves.

Keywords: NARMA; languishing; flourishing; peer mentoring; tutoring; university residences; student wellbeing; South Africa