Women were hit harder: Gender differences in student-athletes' mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present study examined gender identity differences in student-athletes' mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Self-identified female (n = 47; 18-24 years) and male (n = 50; 18-26 years) student-athletes from a mid-sized U-sport Canadian university participated in an online survey assessing athletic identity (Academic and Athletic Identity Scale), mental toughness (10-item Mental Toughness Questionnaire), resilience (Brief Resilience Scale), anxiety (Generalized Anxiety Disorder Questionnaire), depressive symptoms (Patient Health Questionnaire depression module), and coping (Brief COPE). Results from one-way MANOVAs and follow-up ANOVAs revealed that women reported significantly lower resilience, worse anxiety, worse depressive symptoms, employed more emotional and instrumental coping strategies, and endorsed more self-blame compared to men; there were no gender identity differences in athletic identity or mental toughness. Gender-specific multivariate linear regressions highlighted that lower mental toughness was significantly related to heightened anxiety in men, whereas lower resilience was significantly related to heightened anxiety in women. Finally, lower mental toughness, but not resilience, was significantly associated with increased depressive symptoms for both women and men. Taken together, the present results encourage high-performance personnel to foster mental toughness and resilience in student-athletes—with distinct efforts to bolster resilience in student-athletes identifying as women—as these constructs may attenuate negative mental health consequences (i.e., elevated anxiety and depressive symptoms) of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".