Audrey Talla

Professor Boyle

ENG 170

April 2nd, 2022

 

Mental Health Analysis

 

For this survey analysis, I conducted a survey based on mental health. I posed questions based on how students feel in school to see how it affects them and what this means in terms of Suny New Paltz’s community. The first question I asked was “In the past few weeks, has anything affected you in doing schoolwork or activities outside of school?” Most of my respondents said that something did affect their schoolwork. Factors included were anxiety, distraction from social media, and mental health. To me, this is understandable because teens could have a lot of pressure on them from school or outside of school. Distraction from social media is also common because teens love to be on their phones nowadays. Too much screen time probably prevents them from being focused and completing their work on time. In my survey, only one person said that nothing has affected them completing their schoolwork or activities outside of school. The second question in my survey asked “Do you get enough sleep each night? How many? How does sleep affect your mental health?” For this question, the majority said they do get enough sleep overall. A few students said that it depends on the amount of schoolwork they get. They also said that sleep affects their mental health because when they do get enough sleep, they don’t feel drained throughout the day. So, sleep does help with mental health according to the majority of my participants. The third question in my survey asked “Do you think New Paltz has a supportive community? Are your friends, teachers, etc. people you can go to when you’re feeling down?” All of my respondents said yes to this question. They all feel that New Paltz has a supportive community and feel comfortable talking to their friends or teachers for help. My fourth question was “When being on campus, how often do you think about being at home, with your family?” The majority in my survey said that they do think about being home all the time because they miss their family. Only one person in my survey said that they do not often think about being home, but when they do, it is because they have been in campus for too long. My last question asked to describe their mental health overall. Some people said their mental health is good. Others said that they are not in a good state right one. One mentioned that their mental health was very bad. Overall, a trend I noticed from my survey is that everyone who thinks about being home frequently has a mental health that is pretty good. One person whose mental health was very bad said that they think about being home all the time. This makes sense because if you are going through rough times while in college, you are most likely going to want to be home all the time. Now for those whose mental state is okay, this just means that they miss home. It is normal in college to get homesick when you have been away for a while. Another trend I realized is that everyone in the survey said New Paltz has a supportive community. This shows how students do take advantage of their school’s resources and feel open to express their feelings. These results are important because I learn how everyone’s mental health affects them. I see how each person is doing in school and how outside factors could affect them. In terms of the Campus Space project, I think that if another place were built to help students dealing with stress, a lot of people would use it due to the number of people in my survey who said the school has a supportive community.

 

Reflection:
I enjoyed doing this survey analysis. The process of making a survey to send out to students was entertaining to me. I felt like my topic of mental health would be a good way to see how students are impacted in school. Finding a topic was hard for me to do because I had to think of a place the school did not provide. Although the school has a psychological counseling center, I thought it was a good idea to pose questions on students’ mental health to see if it was helpful or not. Writing my analysis was pretty smooth; I had to summarize all my responses for each question based on each individual. I noticed trends in most of my questions because I got similar answers. For time management, I made sure to plan my writing for each of the responses day by day so I would be able to turn in the paper on time. I wrote my analysis by summarizing each question’s answers, then analyzing the trends at the end. One aspect I think I did well on was summarizing the answers to my survey. One thing I could improve on is explaining the significance of my results and how it could lead to the campus space project.

 

Link to Survey Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfRoVJ7nL7dbfAC_rxKpO64_47Sam28ysXVA8_YT_oF7peAAA/viewform?usp=sf_link