Research by Shailendra Gajanan, a professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh Bradford School of Medicine, suggests the COVID-19 pandemic has marked a turning point for the mental health of middle and high school students, who are already vulnerable.
The survey is the fourth Gajanan has conducted for the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, a legislative arm of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. After studying three years of survey responses, the researchers found that low-income students in both rural and urban areas suffer more mentally and academically than their more economically stable peers, but that rural students suffer more mental distress due to a lack of resources.
Comparing 2017 and 2019, the number of rural counties with more students with high stress levels in 2021 increased significantly, while the number of urban counties with more students with high stress levels remained consistently low.
Students in rural areas are less likely to have access to mental health services or the technology they need to attend school online, Gajanan said. Parents in rural areas also tend to have lower levels of education, making it harder for them to help with schoolwork, and single-parent households are more prevalent, leaving children with less supervision.
Gajanan also found that counties with higher levels of mental stress had a negative impact on student academic performance. After the study was published and covered in Spotlight PA, Gajanan was invited to be a keynote speaker at the Pennsylvania Association of County Administrators of Mental Health and Developmental Services.
After Gajanan’s presentation, several districts followed up, and Gajanan provided each district office and commissioner with individualized data so they could initiate plans to reduce students’ mental stress.
Methodology Overview
of Pennsylvania Rural Center Gajanan received three years’ worth of Pennsylvania Youth Survey results: responses from 2017, 2019 and 2021 in a data set so large that it crashed his computer and he needed an external hard drive to store them.
The survey, conducted every two years, asks students in grades 6, 8, 10 and 12 hundreds of questions about demographic information, attitudes toward drugs and weapons, academics, family and mental health. How will Gajanan use this information to answer the center’s questions?
Borrowing a methodology from his own extensive research on global hunger, he created a mental health index indicating students’ stress levels by giving each student’s responses a value of 0 or 1. He then looked at year-over-year changes in students’ stress levels to assess the impact of the pandemic.
— Kimberly Murcott Weinberg
