Factors Associated With College Students' Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Some of the variables associated with college students' mental health can be grouped into five broad categories: (a) individual characteristics (e g , gender and sexual orientation), (b) interpersonal factors (e g , sense of belonging), (c) institutional factors (e g , perceptions of a supportive environment), (d) health and safety factors (e g , nutrition and sleep), and, (e) stressors (e g , financial and academic;Fink, 2014;Oswalt & Wyatt, 2011) Measures Our individual measures include students' gender;sexual orientation;race/ethnicity;international status;caregiver status;first-generation status, defined as neither parent/guardian earning a bachelor's degree;social class, scaled from 1 (low-income) to 5 (wealthy);transfer status;and disability, including physical, learning, neurodevelopmental/cognitive, or two or more disabilities [ ]for the stressors, we asked students to indicate whether they experienced obstacles in their transition to online classes (e g , lack of access to technology) and whether they experienced financial hardships (e g , loss of wages), coded 1 (yes) and 0 (no) [ ]unexpected increases in technology spending, loss of wages from on-campus employment, loss or cancellation of job and internship offers, and loss or reduction of income from family members were associated with increased odds of MDD