The mental health of parent versus non-parent post-secondary students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Post-secondary students experience abnormally high levels of stress compared to the general population, and parents pursuing post-secondary education have additional demands that challenge their mental health. Understanding the mental health of parent versus non-parent students is imperative to support students in their academic pursuits. The purpose of this mixed-methods, cross-sectional paper was two-fold: (1) to investigate the mental health (flourishing/languishing) of parents pursuing post-secondary education in Ontario, Canada with children/youth aged 0-18 years compared to non-parent post-secondary students; and (2) to explore parents' and non-parents' lived experiences of mental health (flourishing/languishing) while pursuing post-secondary education. A total of 374 students (n = 86 parents; n = 288 non-parents) completed an online survey that included demographics and the previously validated Mental Health Continuum-Short Form. A subset of participants (n = 10 parents; n = 10 non-parents) participated in one of six focus groups (3 parent focus groups; 3 non-parent focus groups). Results from the independent sample t-tests indicated no significant differences between the overall mental health scores. Thematic analysis revealed 4 themes for student-parents: (1) factors that challenge mental health; (2) realities of being a student-parent; (3) social connectivity among family and friends; and (4) mental health fluctuations. A total of 6 non-parent specific themes were found: (1) social connectivity among peers; (2) factors that challenge mental health; (3) the bidirectional relationship between school and mental health status; (4) prioritizing academic roles; (5) finding purpose through academic pursuits; and (6) admiration for student-parents. Findings from the current study highlight the dichotomy in student-parent versus non-parent academic identities and are important for university personnel to understand to provide tailored supports.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".