Testing Brief Online Psychosocial Interventions to Improve Mental Health in High Schools During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Longitudinal Peer and Family Relationships Impact on Adolescent Mood During COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to poor emotional and social functioning among youth, and particularly for youth from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. The goal of the current project is to test two brief online interventions to improve youth social and emotional functioning in the context of the pandemic and to reduce socioeconomic inequalities in those outcomes. One intervention (theories of emotion intervention; Smith et al., 2018) targets the belief that emotions are fixed and there is little one can do to change them and teaches youth ways they can manage and reduce their negative emotions. Our preliminary data of adolescents during the stay-at-home orders in May suggests that those who believe they cannot change their emotions are more than twice as likely to have depression (PHQ-2 cutoff; Richardson et al., 2010) than youth who believe they can change their emotions (65% vs. 30%). Youth from low-SES backgrounds were more likely to believe they cannot change their emotions, which could contribute to mental health disparities. The second intervention is a school belonging intervention (Borman et al., 2019) that focuses on struggles that students are having during the pandemic, including online learning, family conflict, and navigating peer relationships. The intervention is designed to show adolescents that other students are struggling in these areas and ways that students have learned to cope and feel better over time (e.g., through caring interactions with teachers and other students). Students with lower school belonging in our data were more likely to have depression than students with higher school belonging (62% vs. 40%). Students from low-SES backgrounds were also more likely to report low school belonging than students from higher-SES backgrounds.
In the ongoing study, our team is testing these interventions we have adapted to specifically address pandemic-related challenges this fall in three urban and socioeconomically diverse high schools (N = 3,800 students). There will be a pre-intervention and end-of-semester survey assessing emotional and social functioning (e.g., depressive symptoms, loneliness). Students are randomized to one of two interventions, which will be delivered in two 20-minute blocks in September. There is no control group due to ethical concerns about the high rates of mental health problems indicated by our preliminary survey and prior efficacy studies for these interventions. We hypothesize that youth randomized to the theories of emotion group will report improved emotional functioning compared to the school belonging group. However, we predict that youth in the school belonging group will report improved social functioning compared to youth in the theories of emotion group. We hypothesize greater benefits for youth from low-SES backgrounds for both interventions.
This presentation will be our first report of the results from the end-of-fall survey, which tests whether the theories of emotion and school belonging interventions lead to reductions in emotional and social functioning compared to the beginning of the school year. Intervention-specific mediators, including theories of emotion and school belonging, will be tested. The study will test for moderators of intervention effectiveness beyond SES, including gender, race/ethnicity, and year in school.

Authors

• Jenalee Doom, University of Denver
  Presenting Author

• Christopher Rozek, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kenia Rivera, University of Denver
  Non-Presenting Author

• Deborah Han, University of Denver
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ella Rushing, University of Denver
  Non-Presenting Author