Gajanan shows rural students had more mental stress during pandemic

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 Dr. Shailendra Gajanan, professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford.

Gajanan performed the study for the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, a legislative agency of the Pennsylvania General Assembly that pays for studies to help government groups and organizations maximize resources for the state’s 3.4 million rural residents.

The center asked Gajanan to examine the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health of students in Pennsylvania schools and provided three years of results from the Pennsylvania Youth Survey, a data set 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, and mental health. How could he use this massive data set 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 by school district over three years of data – tests conducted in 2017, 2019 and 2021.

Gajanan found that 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.

In general, Gajanan said he found that both rural and urban students whose families had lower incomes suffered more than their more financially stable peers during the pandemic, both mentally and academically. However, students with low incomes from rural areas suffered more mental distress than their urban counterparts because of fewer resources.

Rural students were less likely to have access to mental health services and technology needed to attend school online. Other considerations were the generally lower education level of rural parents, which made it harder for them to help their students 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 that they may initiate plans to lower levels of mental stress for students.

Gajanan has experience studying the effects of food scarcity and other public health issues such as immunization for chikungunya, a disease transmitted through mosquitos, in his native India.

This is the fourth grant he has won for a study conducted for the center, which sponsors research projects, collects data on trends in rural Pennsylvania, and publishes information and research results about diverse people and communities in rural Pennsylvania. Unlike other grant-giving organizations, the center puts out an open call for proposals to study topics of importance to the state. Gajanan’s other projects for the center studied the Pennsylvania wine industry, use of shale gas drilling fees and childhood obesity.

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