Protocol for a Mental Health and Substance Use Trend Study: the World Mental Health-International College Student (WMH-ICS) Survey in Canada (Preprint)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND The World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Health-International College Student (WMH-ICS) initiative aims to screen for mental health and substance use problems among post-secondary students on a global scale as well as to develop and evaluate evidence-based preventive and ameliorative interventions for this population. The epidemiologic surveys—a core component of the WMH-ICS initiative—are self-administered online questionnaires that generate diagnostic estimates for a wide range of common mental disorders and have been administered to over 95,000 students across 16 countries around the world. This protocol paper presents the Canadian version of the WMH-ICS survey, detailing the adapted survey instrument, the unique weekly cross-sectional administration, the multi-tiered recruitment strategy, and the associated risk mitigation protocols. OBJECTIVE This paper aims to provide a methodological resource for researchers conducting cross-national comparisons of WMH-ICS data, as well as to serve as a useful guide for those interested in replicating the outlined cross-sectional methodology to better understand how mental health and substance use vary over time among university students. METHODS The online survey is based on the WMH-ICS survey instrument and has been modified to the Canadian context by the addition of questions pertaining to Canadian-based guidelines and the translation of the survey to Canadian French. The survey was administered through the Qualtrics survey platform and was sent to an independent stratified random sample of 350 students per site weekly, followed by two reminder emails. Upon survey closure every week, a random subsample of 70 non-responders were followed up with via phone or through a personal email in an effort to decrease non-responder bias. The survey is accompanied by an extensive risk mitigation protocol that stratifies respondents by level of need and provides tailored service recommendations, including a facilitated expedited appointment to student counselling services for those at increased risk of suicide. RESULTS In February 2020, the Canadian survey was deployed at the University of British Columbia. This was followed by deployment at Simon Fraser University (November 2020) and McMaster University (January 2021). Additional Canadian sites are currently in various stages of assessment and implementation. As of November 18th 2021, 21,143 responses have been collected. CONCLUSIONS The Canadian version of the WMH-ICS survey is based on a novel methodological approach centered on the weekly administration of a comprehensive cross-sectional survey to independent stratified random samples of university students. After 22 months of consecutive survey administration, we have developed and refined a survey protocol that has proven effective in engaging students at three Canadian institutions, allowing us to track how mental health and substance use vary over time using an internationally developed university student survey based on DSM-5 criteria.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.041 | 0.060 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.119 | 0.026 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".