Rural students took a mental health hit during the pandemic, a Pitt-Bradford professor found

The COVID-19 pandemic was a tipping point for the mental health of already vulnerable middle and high school students, according to a study by Shailendra Gajanan, professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford.

The study was Gajanan’s fourth for the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, a legislative agency of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. Studying three years of survey responses, he found that while lower-income students in both rural and urban areas suffered more mentally and academically than their financially stable peers, students in rural areas dealt with more mental distress because of a lack of resources.

Compared with 2017 and 2019, the number of rural counties with many students experiencing high stress levels in 2021 increased significantly, while the number of urban counties with many students experiencing high stress levels remained consistently lower.

Rural students were less likely to have access to mental health services and the technology needed to attend school online. Gajanan also noted the generally lower education level of rural parents, which made it harder for them to help with schoolwork, and the prevalence of single-parent households, which left children without as much supervision.

Gajanan also found that in counties with higher levels of mental stress, students’ academic performance was negatively affected. Once the study was published and reported on by Spotlight PA, Gajanan was invited to be the keynote speaker for the Pennsylvania Association of County Administrators of Mental Health and Developmental Services.

Following his presentation, several counties followed up with Gajanan, and he has provided their offices and commissioners with individual data so they may initiate plans to lower levels of mental stress for students.

A look at the method

The Center for Rural Pennsylvania provided Gajanan with three years of results from the Pennsylvania Youth Survey — the 2017, 2019 and 2021 responses formed a dataset so large that it crashed his computer and required an external hard drive to store.

Every other year, the survey asks students in grades 6, 8, 10 and 12 hundreds of questions, including demographic information, attitudes toward drugs and weapons, academics, their families, mental health and more. How could Gajanan harness this information to answer the center’s question?

He borrowed a method from his extensive research on global hunger, giving each student’s answer a value of 0 or 1 to create a mental health index for students indicating their stress level. He then examined changes in students’ stress levels year-over-year to assess the pandemic’s impact.

— Kimberly Marcott Weinberg