Original title: Students under lockdown: Comparisons of students’ social networks and mental health before and during the COVID-19 crisis in Switzerland
Researchers tracked Swiss undergraduates before and during the pandemic. They compared each student's social connections and mental health over time, including how often students interacted, studied together, and received support. During the crisis, interaction and study-together networks became thinner, more students studied alone, and several signs of poor mental health worsened. Students' worries also shifted from missing social life to health, loved ones, and the future.
Imagine arriving at school to find that your usual lunch table has gone quiet and your study group has scattered. It becomes harder to share work or get comfort from friends, even if you still have ways to contact them. In this paper, the quiet table and scattered group stand for students' thinner social ties, while the harder days stand for the worsening mental health measures.
University students can lose everyday contact with classmates when teaching moves online or campuses close. This study links thinner interaction and co-studying networks, less emotional support, and physical isolation with worse mental health trajectories, pointing to social connection as something universities should consider when supporting students.
The abstract reports associations, including exploratory findings, but does not establish that isolation or COVID-19 worries caused mental health to worsen. It describes Swiss undergraduate cohorts during the crisis in April 2020, so it does not show whether the same patterns apply to other groups or later periods.
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Students under lockdown: Comparisons of students’ social networks and mental health before and during the COVID-19 crisis in Switzerland — Timon Elmer, Kieran Mepham, Christoph Stadtfeld — PLoS ONE — doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0236337
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.