2020/12/16 by Ravi Sharma, Sharma, Ravi, Sri Divya Pagadala +9
Psychology · Social Sciences · #COVID-19 and Mental Health #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Mental Health via Writing
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2012.09369
In this paper, we report experimental results on assessing the impact of\nCOVID-19 on college students by processing free-form texts generated by them.\nBy free-form texts, we mean textual entries posted by college students\n(enrolled in a four year US college) via an app specifically designed to assess\nand improve their mental health. Using a dataset comprising of more than 9000\ntextual entries from 1451 students collected over four months (split between\npre and post COVID-19), and established NLP techniques, a) we assess how topics\nof most interest to student change between pre and post COVID-19, and b) we\nassess the sentiments that students exhibit in each topic between pre and post\nCOVID-19. Our analysis reveals that topics like Education became noticeably\nless important to students post COVID-19, while Health became much more\ntrending. We also found that across all topics, negative sentiment among\nstudents post COVID-19 was much higher compared to pre-COVID-19. We expect our\nstudy to have an impact on policy-makers in higher education across several\nspectra, including college administrators, teachers, parents, and mental health\ncounselors.\n