Building a Safety Net Out of Scraps [Anonymised Qualitative Dataset]

The anonymised data set comes from a study examining how UK undergraduates living with mental illness construct, experience, and manage their personal support networks during university. To achieve this, we adopted an approach that attends to both the structural and experiential dimensions of support, allowing students to define and represent their networks on their own terms. This broader definition of support invited reflection not only on formal and informal relationships but also on partial, ambivalent, and solitary strategies. We attended to the situated nature of these experiences, considering how support is navigated, interpreted, and made meaningful within institutional and relational contexts. Such an approach offers a relationally grounded understanding of how support operates among UK undergraduates with mental illness, and how mental health might be better supported through the leveraging of personal support networks.
All names have been replaced with pseudonyms.