Adult first-year students’ reports of depressive symptoms at a rural South African university
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Depression is a significant mental health issue affecting university students, especially those in their first year of study. Unfortunately, much of the research has focused on students in the adolescent stage of development. This study, which is part of a larger project, sought to explore depressive symptoms in older students. We administered the University Student Depression Inventory (USDI) to a sample of 318 undergraduate first-year students between 22 and 54 years at a rural-based university in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. The sample comprised mainly women (64.2%). We examined depressive symptom prevalence, gender, rural/urban background, and age effects. The results showed that men and rural students reported significantly more depressive symptoms, with 7.9% of the sample reporting thoughts of suicide and 16.7% questioning whether life is worth living, most or all of the time. Almost one-quarter (24.5%) of the participants stated that they spend more time alone than they did previously, and 17.9% reported loss of interest in previously enjoyed activities. Although the participants reported fewer depressive symptoms overall, compared to an earlier study of adolescent university students, the present findings raise concern. Considering that almost one-quarter of the participants reported a loss of interest (which is a critical symptom of depressive illness) and one in six questioning whether life is worth living, the need for active interventions, support and prevention programmes for students at universities is an urgent matter.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".