In early March 2020, the 91Ě˝»¨ became the first four-year U.S. university to transition to online-only classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

severe consequences of these physical distancing measures. To understand how this change affected college students’ mental health, 91Ě˝»¨researchers surveyed 147 91Ě˝»¨students over the 2020 spring quarter, which began shortly after the university transitioned to online-only classes. The team compared the students’ responses to a previous survey of 253 students in spring quarter 2019.

The researchers didn’t see much change in average levels of students’ depressive symptoms, anxiety, stress or loneliness between 2019 and 2020 or between the beginning and the end of spring quarter 2020. But these average values were masking large differences in students’ individual pandemic experiences. In general, students who used more problem-focused forms of coping — creating plans, focusing on positive aspects, etc. — experienced fewer mental health symptoms than those who disengaged or ignored a situation that was bothering them.

The researchers June 28 in PLOS ONE.

“During the pandemic, the challenges of online learning were entwined with social isolation, family demands and socioeconomic pressures,” said lead author , an affiliate associate professor in the 91Ě˝»¨Information School. “There’s not a simple answer to the question of how students were affected: Some experienced intense distress while others were unscathed.”

For the past four years, this team has spent spring quarter studying what factors contribute to undergraduates’ overall mental health and well-being. Students are invited to continue participating in each spring quarter study, and the researchers also recruit new students each time. In a previous paper, the researchers found that experiencing discrimination events altered student behavior, such as the amount of sleep or exercise a student got following the event.

For the 2020 cohort, the team used three different survey methods to monitor student health. First, they sent large surveys at the beginning and end of spring quarter. Then participants received two shorter surveys each week that asked them to reflect on how they felt — in terms of stress, loneliness, depressive symptoms — in the moment.

In general, students who reported more mental health symptoms at the beginning of the pandemic continued to experience elevated symptoms during the pandemic.

“Problem-focused coping protected students from the harmful effects of stress (anxiety and depression, for example), even though students who used more problem-focused strategies reported more stress,” said co-author , a 91Ě˝»¨doctoral student in clinical psychology.

“What these findings suggest is that students who coped by actively confronting their challenges, rather than avoiding them, still experienced highly stressful events over the course of the pandemic. However, they were protected from the mental health consequences,” Kuehn said. “It may not always feel pleasant or easy to confront the challenges of daily life, particularly during a pandemic, but doing so is likely to be highly beneficial in terms of reducing anxiety and depressive symptoms.”

Finally, at the end of spring quarter, the team conducted 90-minute in-depth interviews over Zoom with a subset of participants to gain deeper insight into their experiences.

The students described a range of challenges that interfered with learning:

• Decreased interaction with faculty and peers — students mentioned that having fewer opportunities to interact with faculty and peers left them feeling less engaged. Some students said they felt like part-time students, even when they had full course loads
• No shared learning environments — students spoke longingly of a table in a dorm or a spot in the library where they used to gather with classmates for impromptu study sessions
• Family needs — family members’ requests or noise often interrupted studying and even test-taking. Family needs, such as caregiving, were a particular challenge to learning for first-generation college students
• Interrupted autonomy — some students felt “trapped” back at home and described difficult “power dynamics” with their parents
• Well-being and mental health — many students described disrupted sleep, decreased motivation, and said that they felt depressed or anxious for periods of time. Students’ feelings of detachment from school sometimes contributed to depression. Similarly, worry about grades sometimes cascaded into anxiety and insomnia that, in turn, made it harder to focus

Students also developed strategies to combat these challenges, including:

• Self-learning — students used independent online research to figure out answers to their questions and made up their own experiments to explore what they were learning in class
• Structuring routines and environments — many students created fixed schedules for studying or used physical calendars to mark timelines and assignments
• Learning with peers — students created remote study groups and held informal remote co-working sessions that combined homework with personal conversations, which helped keep them on task
• Participating more in online spaces — many students found it less daunting to ask questions in online classes than in large lecture halls, others found it easier to participate in online office hours and meetings with advisers
• Using communication platforms for emotional wellbeing — some students used telehealth or meditation apps, but almost all of them used video communication to check in with their friends. Students emphasized that these connections were critical for their mental health

“On an optimistic note, students are emerging with critical skills for learning and maintaining connectedness with peers over a distance,” Morris said. “These active coping skills, which include things such as initiating virtual co-working sessions, leveraging online functions to participate in class and checking in on friends in an emotionally sensitive way, will have continued value as we resume in-person and hybrid models of education.”

The team plans to follow students through all four years of their time at the UW. The first study cohort graduated this year, and the second cohort will graduate in spring 2022.

Additional co-authors are Jennifer Brown, an alumnus of the 91Ě˝»¨school of public health who is the research coordinator for this project; , a professor in the 91Ě˝»¨School of Social Work; and , 91Ě˝»¨doctoral students in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; , a doctoral student in the Information School; , a 91Ě˝»¨professor of electrical and computer engineering; , professor and dean of the 91Ě˝»¨Information School; , a researcher at Google; and , a professor in the Allen School. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, Google, the Allen School, 91Ě˝»¨Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, the 91Ě˝»¨College of Engineering and the 91Ě˝»¨Population Health Initiative.

For more information, contact Morris at margiemm@uw.edu.

Grant numbers: EDA-2009977, CHS-2016365, CHS-1941537, F31MH117827

Discrimination — differential treatment based on an aspect of someone’s identity, such as nationality, race, sexual orientation or gender — is linked to lower success in careers and poorer health. But there is little information about how individual discrimination events affect people in the short term and then lead to these longer-term disparities.

91Ě˝»¨ researchers aimed to understand both the prevalence of discrimination events and how these events affect college students in their daily lives.

Over the course of two academic quarters, the team compared students’ self-reports of unfair treatment to passively tracked changes in daily activities, such as hours slept, steps taken or time spent on the phone. On average, students who encountered unfair treatment were more physically active, interacted with their phones more and spent less time in bed on the day of the event. The team will Nov. 12 at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in Austin, Texas.

“We looked at objective measures of behavior to try to really understand how this experience changed students’ daily life,” said lead author, a doctoral student in the 91Ě˝»¨Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “The ultimate goal is to use this information to develop changes that we can make both in terms of the educational structure and individual support systems for students to help them succeed both during and after their time in college.”

The project started out as a way to monitor students’ mental health during college.

“I was struck by how many students suffered from mental health issues and depression, due in part to the increased stress of college and being away from home,” said co-author, professor and dean of the 91Ě˝»¨Information School. “Our approach in this paper, using passive sensing and data modeling, really lends itself to studying frequent events. Unfair treatment, or discrimination, might happen repeatedly in a quarter.”

The team recruited 209 first-year 91Ě˝»¨students from across campus for a study over the 2018 winter and spring academic quarters. Of the 176 students who completed the study, 41% were in the College of Engineering while the rest were spread between various academic colleges, 65% identified as women and 29% identified as first-generation college students.

Participants wore Fitbit Flex 2 devices to track daily activities like time asleep and physical activity. The students also had to track location, activity, screen unlocking events and phone call length.

The team sent the students a series of surveys throughout the six-month study, including short “check-in” surveys at least twice a week. During the weeks before midterm and final exams, the students got a variation of this survey four times every day. Among the survey questions: Had the student, in the past 24 hours, been unfairly treated because of “ancestry or national origin, gender, sexual orientation, intelligence, major, learning disability, education or income level, age, religion, physical disability, height, weight or other aspect of one’s physical appearance?”

“We had a very large table comparing everything, such as the number of steps that you’ve had for each day,” Sefidgar said. “We also marked the days for the reports when they exist. Then it’s a matter of determining for each individual whether there are changes for days with discrimination events compared to days with no events.”

Overall, the researchers collected around 450 discrimination events and about one terabyte of data. The team analyzed people’s actions on days when they were and weren’t experiencing discrimination. On average, when students reported an unfair event they walked 500 more steps, had one more phone call in the evening, interacted five more times with their phones in the morning and spent about 15 fewer minutes in bed compared to days when they didn’t experience discrimination.

“It’s so hard to summarize the impact of something like this in a few statistics,” said senior author, a professor in the Allen School. “Some people move more, sleep more or talk on the phone more, while some people do less. Maybe one student is reacting by playing games all day and another student put down their phone and went to hang out with a friend. It’s giving us a lot of questions to follow up on.”

Nurius will receive the 2016 Educational Leadership in Doctoral Education award from the Group for the Advancement of Doctoral Education in Social Work (GADE) at a meeting in November. The award recognizes current or former faculty members who “display a strong commitment to doctoral education and a demonstrated record of advancing doctoral education at the national or international level,” according to a release.

“Recognizing leaders like you was exactly what we had in mind when we created this award,” GADE Board President Elizabeth Lightfoot wrote in an email to Nurius. “While many of us were aware how strongly committed you were to doctoral education, we were awestruck learning about all of your extraordinary contributions.”

Nurius, who joined the 91Ě˝»¨in 1984, is the Grace Beals-Ferguson Scholar and Professor, associate dean for transdisciplinary scholarship and fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. She studies processes and effects of life course stress and trauma on disadvantaged populations, with implications for intervention and resilience. Her research incorporates physical, mental and behavioral health, examining ways that biology combines with the physical and social environment to impact health and functioning outcomes.

“The complexity of health, social, and environmental problems that social work encounters increasingly propels movement toward transdisciplinary, impact-oriented and community-engaged science. This requires us to reach for innovative and collaborative training capacity well-suited to these evolving needs, which has been an area of sustained priority for me,” Nurius said.

“I am deeply honored to be receiving this award. I am appreciative to GADE for seeking to illuminate contributions to doctoral training by creating it, and to my social work and 91Ě˝»¨colleagues who share this sense of mission, including our terrific students who nudge and inspire us onward.”

In a letter nominating Nurius for the award, dean of the 91Ě˝»¨School of Social Work, lauded her “innovative, boundary-spanning” work. Nurius has fostered interdisciplinary partnerships across campus that benefit doctoral students and further the field of social work, Uehara said. And as the vice president of GADE and of the Society for Social Work and Research, Nurius helped doctoral students and early scholars prepare for rapidly changing research environments with “prodigious investments of intellectual, collegial and scholarly labor.”

91Ě˝»¨social work professor Susan Kemp said Nurius is known for her work in mentoring students, fostering academic networks and developing training resources locally and nationally.

Nurius also served as director of the UW’s doctoral program in social welfare for seven years and spent 16 years directing a program funded by the National Institutes of Health that trains researchers focused on preventing mental health problems in vulnerable populations. She has worked at the national and international levels, speaking at numerous conferences and developing collaborations with European colleagues.

For more information, contact Nurius at nurius@uw.edu or 206-685-1682.