The Importance of Others: The Link Between Stress and Social Connectedness in University Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The mental health of undergraduate students is a concern across many North American institutions. To support students’ mental well-being and help them manage stress, many Canadian post-secondary institutions have introduced a mid-semester break during the fall term. However, there has been limited work evaluating whether this fall break is associated with a decrease in stress (a well-established correlate of mental health). Further, it is not known which demographic variables and lifestyle factors (e.g., sleep patterns, regular exercise) may contribute to a change in stress surrounding the fall break. We assessed the effects of the fall break on perceived stress levels and investigated whether these effects varied according to gender and the quality of students’ social network. Our results indicate that on its own, the fall break did not reduce students’ level of perceived stress. Further, students who reported feeling socially disconnected reported greater stress (both pre- and post-break) than those who reported being more content with their social network. Men in our sample reported less perceived stress than women. We recommend that mental health initiatives on campuses integrate strategies to build social connections between students and emphasize outreach programs to students who report feeling socially disconnected. We acknowledge the increased necessity and challenge of doing this in the context of education in the time of COVID-19.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".