Rates of mental health problems are increasing among today?s college students. The College Student Mental Health Pathways study will help us better understand the trajectories of mental health among college students, while also determining which combination of social and emotional skills or competencies best predict stronger mental health outcomes. The results of this study will guide efforts to improve behavioral health among college students by illustrating the ways that mental health changes over time and will explore skills to be targeted for effective and timely interventions.
The first aim (AIM 1) of the project is to find out how mental health changes over the course of an undergraduate?s career by tracking individual students? progression across four years of college (for a total of six years of data collection, representing six separate student cohorts, and two complete four year data sets). This project will test the way that students? race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and sexual orientation relate both to their mental health and how their mental health changes over time, with the goal of answering the question: who is getting better in college, and who is getting worse? Next, (AIM 2) this project will build and test a model of how the social and emotional skills that students learned before they got to college (and those they learned since they matriculated) relate both to their overall mental health and to the way that their mental health changes over time. What combination of social and emotional skills (including skills like making and keeping friends, appropriately expressing emotions, and reading the emotional state of others) is most associated with mental health, and what skills are associated with distress? Further, this will address whether the social and emotional skills students have determine the overall change in mental health that students experience over the course of their college careers. Further, how do demographic factors like race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and sexual orientation influence the roles that those skills have? By using a large, multi-year dataset, following students at two colleges over a total of six years, this project will provide unique insight into the mental health of college students.
Rates of mental health problems are increasing among today?s college students. The College Student Mental Health Pathways study seeks to better understand the trajectories of mental health among college students while also determining which combination of social and emotional skills or competencies best predict stronger mental health outcomes. The research is guided by a desire to improve behavioral health among college students by illuminating the trajectories of mental health problems and exploring skills which could be targeted for intervention in future studies.
