Our project, Mental Health During Quarantine, was focused around seeing how Miami students were affected mentally by the quarantine period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research question asked if students felt effects of quarantine on their mental health, our prediction being that students have had an overall negative effect on their mental health. We chose to address the quarantine period because students were still finishing classes while possibly changing living situations at that point. This study is relevant because we are currently still in the pandemic and some students may still be in compromised living situations due to that. After routine demographic questions, we asked students to note details of who they lived with and if their living situation had changed. Since Miami students were asked to leave the dorms, which lead to many students moving back into their parents’ houses, we wanted to see if some students had more positive or negative experiences depending on their living situation. Our research was conducted using a Qualtrics survey that was distributed to a variety of Miami students, mostly through email and social media, having 68 participants total. The major take away from our data was that regardless of their experiences during quarantine, the majority of students felt a negative effect on all aspects of their mental health. Women tended to have more negative answers, but more women than men were involved in the study. Students also noted that they had higher negative changes in their levels of depression and anxiety compared to their level of stress. Information from our study could be used by professors and administrators to evaluate the leniency of grading and other exceptions during the spring 2020 semester.
Authors: Gia Mariani, Erin Belcher, and Carlos Rodriguez
Faculty Advisors: Jacqueline Daugherty and Wen-Ching Chuang, Western Program
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