Effects of COVID-19 on College Students’ Mental Health in the United States: Interview Survey Study

Changwon Son, Sudeep Hegde, Alec Smith, Xiaomei Wang, Farzan Sasangohar · Journal of Medical Internet Research · 2020 · health-psychology · 10.2196/21279 · record son2020-effects-of-covid-19-on-college-stu
tag layer · index · concepts · authors · עברית
Where this record's text came from. 2026-08-21 schema-0.3 pass: every quote verified as an exact substring of the staged text and anchored at merge time; concept terms verified present; every edge endpoint an existing node.
This record’s own method is survey, and the tags below follow from that. A review’s findings, quantities and statistics are things stated IN this paper, and some of them report results obtained elsewhere. No tag on this page names a different author. Measured across every review in this corpus, 81% of a review’s tags carry no citation at all — most of them are the review speaking. The corpus does not adjudicate the rest: read an unmarked tag as a claim this paper makes, not necessarily one it made first.
How to read this page. The article itself is not reproduced here — this paper is not cleared for redistribution, so what follows is the tag layer alone. The evidence sentences are withheld with the article. The table at the foot lists every tag the record carries; each row names the facet it belongs to, and the whose words column says whether the tag records the paper's own wording or the tagger's sentence about the paper. Every tag links to each other paper in the corpus carrying it. The machine-readable edition of the same thing is the TEI file beside this one, where the tags live in standOff, and the article is at its publisher via the link below. When we have changed our mind. Some entries in the table begin with a word in capitals and the reason for it. EVIDENCE CORRECTED — the finding still stands, but we had quoted the wrong sentence from the paper, and the quotation has been replaced with the right one. RETRACTED — the entry itself was wrong; it stays on the page, marked, with the reason, rather than being deleted. WITHDRAWN AND REPLACED — the entry was wrong, and a corrected version of it appears in the entries below. Each mark carries its own reason, in brackets, because the reasons differ from one entry to the next. An entry we have WITHDRAWN is removed from this page and kept in the record, with its reason. A line reading Audit and a date is a later re-reading of the entry against its whole sentence: DOUBTFUL means it was kept, and the reason says what is loose about it. Quotation marks inside the tagger's sentence. Where a tag is the tagger's own sentence, a phrase in quotation marks inside it is borrowed from the paper — the tagger's wording around it is not. The paper's own sentence is the evidence quote for that row; on this page it is withheld with the article, and the article is at its publisher. Nothing inside quotation marks anywhere on this page is ours: if it is quoted, it is the paper's. Whose words a concept carries. A concept entry records a term the paper itself uses, so the term, the sense given for it, and its evidence are the paper's own words, quoted where the paper fixes them. This is the opposite of a sense entry in the tag table, which is the tagger's sentence about how the paper uses a term. Where a concept entry could not be grounded in the paper's words, the entry says so on its own row.
Other fields define these differently the same word, defined another way in another discipline
saturation 4 fields · categories 3 fields

Tags on this paper

Every tag the record carries, each linking to every other paper in the corpus that carries it. A tag appears here whether or not its words occur in the article — the spans below are only the ones a sentence in this paper licenses. Of the 10 concept tags on this paper, all 10 are grounded in a quoted sentence. All carry the tagger's gloss of what the term means in this paper, which is not something the article can license.
open coding a priori codes categories stressors PSS single coder interview survey survey-only studies counseling service saturation two apertures on one set of transcripts the coder is the instrument, and there was one twenty interviewers, none of them the authors a transcript produced by a machine and checked by hand a non-pandemic comparison inside the same interview survey
Method, as described: semistructured Zoom interviews by 20 trained undergraduate researchers, transcribed by an AI service and manually verified, with PSS-10 scores, a four-point severity rating over twelve categories, and open thematic coding by a single coder reviewed by two others

Legend

relation to other workclaim_relationshow this paper stands to another: agrees, contradicts, extends, qualifies
claim typeclaim_typethe shape of the claim: existence, mechanism, method, critique, prediction, null
concept edgeconcept_edgesan asserted relation between two concepts, with the sentence asserting it
conceptconceptsan idea the paper works with, quoted where the paper uses it
content tagcontent_tagsa finding, definition, quantity, statistic or variable named in the paper
contributioncontributionwhat the paper claims to add
controlcontrolsan experiment run to eliminate a rival explanation
limitationlimitationswhat the paper says its evidence cannot support
mechanismmechanismshow the reported effect is said to come about
methodmethodhow the paper produced its evidence
object of studyobject_of_studywhat the paper is about — the thing it investigates
phenomenonphenomenonthe effect or regularity under study
research questionresearch_questionthe question the paper sets itself
sensesensesa distinct use of a term, quoted where the paper fixes it
transfertransfersa method or concept carried in from another field

The paper

The full text is not reproduced here. This article is not cleared for redistribution, so the page carries the tag layer only. Its evidence sentences are withheld; the grounding status remains with each tag, and the article itself is at https://doi.org/10.2196/21279. The reading view exists for the papers whose licence permits it.

Every tag on this page

claim_relations 3 · claim_type 1 · concept_edges 2 · concepts 10 · content_tags 14 · contribution 1 · controls 6 · limitations 6 · mechanisms 5 · method 1 · object_of_study 1 · phenomenon 1 · research_question 1 · senses 5 · transfers 2

Relations on this page carry a quotation for the claim. Where a relation was separately evidenced — and so tested against the vocabulary for its type — the row says so; 2 of 2 relations here carry that mark. The rest are the tagger’s reading of the sentence quoted beside them.

facettagfieldconf.whose words
object_of_studywhat the COVID-19 pandemic did to the mental health of undergraduates at one large university, asked in a semistructured interview a month after the state stay-at-home order
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
object_of_studythe paper's words
research_questionwhich pandemic stressors students report, how severely each affects them, and why so few used the counselling service available to them
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
research_questionthe paper's words
contributionan interview survey of undergraduates during the pandemic peak, carrying both a literature-derived twelve-category severity rating and an open thematic coding of the same transcripts
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
contributionthe paper's words
claim_typeexistence
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_typethe paper's words
phenomenonstudent distress during a pandemic, recorded through two instruments at once - one whose categories were fixed by earlier papers and one with no categories at all
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
phenomenonthe paper's words
methodsurvey
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: survey
methodthe paper's words
mechanismsthe same interviews are read twice - once against twelve categories written by earlier papers and rated 0 to 3, once with no categories at all. Whatever the open coding surfaces that the twelve do not contain is a direct measurement of what the literature's vocabulary could not see. THE COMPARISON IS AVAILABLE IN THIS PAPER AND IS NOT DRAWN
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
mechanisms[0]0.95the tagger's words
mechanismsopen coding without a priori codes means the themes are whatever a trained reader sees. One person did all of it; two others were brought in afterwards to resolve discrepancies and discuss saturation. That is a review, not an independent coding, and no agreement statistic is available because none could be computed
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
mechanisms[1]0.95the tagger's words
mechanismsthe interviews were run by 20 trained undergraduate researchers and none of the authors conducted one. That removes the authors' expectations from the elicitation and introduces twenty different interviewing styles into it - a trade the design makes deliberately and the paper reports plainly
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
mechanisms[2]0.95the tagger's words
mechanismsrecordings were transcribed by an AI service and verified for accuracy manually. The qualitative data is therefore a machine's reading of speech, corrected - and what a correction pass catches is a different set from what it misses
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
mechanisms[3]0.95the tagger's words
mechanismsparticipants were also asked to describe stressors, coping strategies and barriers in a typical semester WITHOUT associating them with the pandemic. The within-person baseline is collected from the same person in the same sitting, which controls for who is answering and not for when they are answering
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
mechanisms[4]0.95the tagger's words
limitationsthe sample is small compared with survey-only studies, traded for elaboration and clarifying detail
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
limitations[0]0.95the tagger's words
limitationsthe sample is from one large university and may not generalize to all college students
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
limitations[1]0.95the tagger's words
limitationsa majority of participants were engineering majors; a stratified nationwide sample across wider disciplines is needed to verify and amend the findings
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
limitations[2]0.95the tagger's words
limitationsalmost none of the participants who had not used the counselling service gave a reason, so the study's central practical question is left open
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
limitations[3]0.95the tagger's words
limitationsmental health problems were not analysed by demographic characteristics or by personal and social context
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
limitations[4]0.95the tagger's words
limitationsmultiple analyses of the collected data are still in progress; only the PSS results and COVID-19-related findings appear here
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
limitations[5]0.95the tagger's words
transfersgrounded theory's open coding step, taken into a health-services interview study and run alongside a fixed rating scale on the same transcripts
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
transfers[0]0.95the tagger's words
transfersautomatic speech transcription, used as the route from recording to analysable text with a manual verification pass
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
transfers[1]0.95the tagger's words
controlsthe same participants asked to describe stressors, coping strategies and barriers for a typical semester, explicitly without associating them with the pandemic
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
eliminates: pandemic-attribution of ordinary student stress - the baseline comes from the same person, so it cannot be a difference between populations · outcome: held
controls[0]0.95the tagger's words
controlsinterviews conducted by 20 trained undergraduate researchers, with none of the authors conducting any
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
eliminates: the authors' own expectations shaping what participants said, at the cost of twenty interviewing styles · outcome: held
controls[1]0.95the tagger's words
controlsmachine transcription verified for accuracy manually before coding
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
eliminates: transcription error being read as what the participant said - though the check is a human pass over a machine output, not two independent transcriptions · outcome: held
controls[2]0.95the tagger's words
controlsthe single coder's themes discussed with two other trained coders to resolve discrepancies among related themes and discuss saturation
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
eliminates: nothing that can be quantified - the second and third coders reviewed one person's coding rather than coding independently, so no agreement statistic exists to report · outcome: partial
controls[3]0.95the tagger's words
controlsa standing instrument, the Perceived Stress Scale-10, carried in unchanged alongside the study's own questions
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
eliminates: the study's own severity ratings standing alone - PSS is comparable to every other study that uses it · outcome: held
controls[4]0.95the tagger's words
controlsonly inclusion criterion recorded: enrolment as an undergraduate at the time of the interview, with recruitment by email, text and snowball sampling
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
eliminates: very little - snowball recruitment on a single stated criterion is a weak control, and recording it as held is recording how weak it is · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held
controls[5]0.95the tagger's words
conceptsopen coding
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: open coding
concepts[0]0.95the paper's words
conceptsa priori codes
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[1]0.95the paper's words
conceptscategories
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: categories
concepts[2]0.95the paper's words
conceptsstressors
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: stressors
concepts[3]0.95the paper's words
conceptsPSS
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: PSS
concepts[4]0.95the paper's words
conceptssingle coder
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: single coder
concepts[5]0.95the paper's words
conceptsinterview survey
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[6]0.95the paper's words
conceptssurvey-only studies
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[7]0.95the paper's words
conceptscounseling service
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[8]0.95the paper's words
conceptssaturation
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: saturation
concepts[9]0.95the paper's words
sensesthe stressor set - AS FIXED IN ADVANCE: twelve academic-, health- and lifestyle-related categories derived from existing literature, rated 0 to 3
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[0]0.95the tagger's words
sensesthe stressor set - AS FOUND IN THE TRANSCRIPTS: themes from an open coding process that uses no a priori codes and takes what can be extracted directly from the data
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[1]0.95the tagger's words
sensesstress - AS SCORED: a PSS-10 total, a widely used instrument measuring overall stress in the past month
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[2]0.95the tagger's words
sensesstress - AS ELABORATED: whatever the participant said when asked to explain each severity rating
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[3]0.95the tagger's words
sensesthe comparison condition - AS DESIGNED: the same students describing stressors and barriers in a typical semester, asked without associating them with the pandemic
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[4]0.95the tagger's words
claim_relationsbuilds-on → existing literature identifying prominent factors affecting college students' mental health, from which the twelve rating categories were taken
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_relations[0]0.95the tagger's words
claim_relationsextends → survey-based studies of student mental health during the pandemic, by adding elaboration and clarifying detail at a smaller sample size
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_relations[1]0.95the tagger's words
claim_relationsqualifies → its own generalisability - one university, a majority of engineering majors, and no demographic breakdown
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_relations[2]0.95the tagger's words
concept_edgesopen coding —distinct-from→ a priori codes
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
differs in: whether the category existed before the data did · the relation itself is separately evidenced · strength of the relation: 0.95 · differs in (stated by the tagger, no quotation): whether the category existed before the data did · the relation stated: the open coding process uses no codes created before the analysis and takes what can be extracted directly from the data - which is the opposite of the twelve literature-derived categories used on the same transcripts
concept_edges[0]0.95the tagger's words
concept_edgesinterview survey —distinct-from→ survey-only studies
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
differs in: whether the participant can elaborate on an answer · the relation itself is separately evidenced · strength of the relation: 0.95 · differs in (stated by the tagger, no quotation): whether the participant can elaborate on an answer · the relation stated: the interview design trades sample size for elaboration and clarifying detail, and the authors position it as complementing rather than replacing the larger survey studies Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its full span and kept, but the span says the interview sample was small compared to survey-only studies; distinct-from is loose.
concept_edges[1]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsPandemic-specific stressors were elicited across 12 categories derived from existing literature on college students' mental health.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[0]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsthe same transcripts were also coded with no a priori codes at all, taking themes directly from the data
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[1]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsA single coder identified the themes and discussed them with two other coders to resolve discrepancies and discuss saturation.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[2]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsinterviews were conducted by 20 trained undergraduate researchers and none of the authors conducted any
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[3]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsparticipants also described stressors and barriers for a typical semester without associating them with the pandemic
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[4]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsa vast majority had not used the university counselling service and only a few gave any reason
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[5]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsmental health problems were not analysed by demographic characteristics or social context
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[6]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsa process which does not use a priori codes or codes created prior to the analysis, placing emphasis on information that can be extracted directly from the data
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: open coding
content_tags.definitions[0]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsthe Perceived Stress Scale-10, a widely used instrument to measure overall stress in the past month
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: PSS
content_tags.definitions[1]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsacademic-, health- and lifestyle-related outcome categories, fixed from existing literature before any interview
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.quantities[0]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsundergraduate researchers conducted the interviews; none of the authors did
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.quantities[1]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsPSS
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: PSS
content_tags.statistics[0]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagsstressors
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: stressors
content_tags.variables[0]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagscategories
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: categories
content_tags.variables[1]0.95the tagger's words

Interpretive choices

Tags that could not be placed in the text:

What was deliberately not tagged, and why, is recorded per paper by the tagger. Where a paper has no such record, this page says so rather than implying that nothing was declined.

© 2026 Shir Sivroni · ORCID 0009-0000-2597-2824