Riverdale students’ mental health seems to be linked with how connected they feel to their community. This study used three mental well-being indicators: anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. Surveyees who answered higher numbers to the question “how connected do you feel to your community (school or other)?” reported fewer mental health issues. Community connection happened to also be the most significant predictor of these mental health indicators among other factors like exercise frequency and social media usage. This study found that a Riverdale high schooler who feels more connected to their community will likely have better mental well-being. 

Over the past six months, I’ve become interested in the role of community in mental health, specifically in teenagers. At Riverdale, administrators stress the importance of coming together. I wanted to see if this effort is significant in the mental health of teenagers and hypothesized that how connected people felt to the community would correlate with improved mental well-being.

To initiate my research, I designed a survey with the help of Upper School Science Teacher Dr. Tracy and administered it last spring to 10th, 11th, and 12th graders at Riverdale. I asked surveyees for activities they participated in, physical exercise frequency, social media usage, and self-reported anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder levels. I received 170 responses from Riverdale students and obtained an additional 130 responses from high school students across the country. These responses allowed me to compare how Riverdale students are doing in different metrics relative to a national baseline.

First off, anxiety was the mental health indicator that Riverdale students reported most strongly. I gave the surveyees options on a Likert scale from 0 to 6, 0 being never feeling anxiety, and 6 being always feeling anxiety. I found that Riverdale is doing better than the national baseline, with fewer people reporting higher levels of anxiety: 4 or above. Students at Riverdale self-reported less depression than feelings of anxiety and again experience less depression than students across the country. Bipolar disorder within Riverdale students is the least reported mental health indicator, another category in which Riverdale students are also doing better than the national baseline (see bar graphs).

For the analysis of the data, I first looked at correlations. A correlation between two variables is how much they tend to move with each other. A correlation of 1 means as one variable goes up the other goes up. A correlation of 0 means they don’t move together, meaning one variable doesn’t affect the values of the other. And a correlation of -1 means that they move inversely, so as one variable goes up the other goes down. In the figure below, we have a graph of Bipolar disorder and Anxiety. They have a correlation of .42, which is the slope of the red line (see jittered scatterplot figure). As Bipolar disorder goes up, Anxiety tends to go up as well.

Also interesting is the correlation matrix for the data, a table with each factor I studied and collected during the survey process. Each variable corresponds perfectly to itself, represented by the big dark blue dots along the diagonal. Orange dots are for negatively correlated variables and blue dots are for positively correlated variables. The size of the dots represents how strong the correlation is, i.e. bigger dot, stronger correlation.

Along with this correlation analysis, I also fitted each mental health indicator to a multiple linear regression. These regressions contained each predictor (factor other than the three mental health indicators), the corresponding coefficients, and the p-values. In a regression, the coefficients show how each factor predicts either Anxiety or Depression. In the anxiety regression table, the HowConnected estimate of -.2359 means that every shift up in how connected teenagers feel corresponds to a .2359 decrease in feelings of anxiety. Using our 0 to 6 scale, this means that a student with the highest feelings of community connectivity will be predicted to report an anxiety score of 1.5 fewer units than a student with the lowest community connectedness. This 1.5 units is quite significant if we look back at the distribution of anxiety as a whole at Riverdale, represented by the red bar graph. The p-value explains how significant each predictor is in the regression. The lower the p-value, the more important the factor is in explaining anxiety or depression. For example, the HowConnected factor in the Anxiety table has a p-value of 0.025 meaning that we can be 97.5% sure that it is significant compared to a random distribution of the data. As another example, the SocialMediaCon p-value of 0.043 in the Depression table allows us 95.7% confidence in its significance compared to random chance. We can reach the following statistically significant conclusions from these regressions: how connected someone feels to their community corresponds to lowered anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder while greater amounts of time spent on social media predict higher depression levels.

Overall, this analysis confirmed our hypothesis that community connection plays a substantial role in teenage mental health. So how can we apply this knowledge to Riverdale students’ experience? I would recommend trying out more school activities like clubs or sports and making more meaningful connections at Riverdale. A student who feels like they belong at Riverdale will likely have better mental health and a more enjoyable life!