Research Blog #1: Initial Topic Idea
Topic: Mental Health
For my final project I would like to address the issue of poor mental health that students face in their College years. Universities are institutionalized to serve in favor of the students who come from a more affluent background, making it stressful for lower income students who have to worry about tuition, loans, following a specific career path, and other things of that nature. I will examine the interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships with anxiety, and how the term anxiety has become medicalized; even further deteriorating a students mental health.
This is a timely and important topic, and many students have explored it from various angles -- and Caroline from our class is also exploring it. The most salient and practical issue right now is that there has been a huge increase in anxiety among students, and that rise has happened very fast, so that state schools especially are scrambling to meet the demand for services at college, and many do not offer adequate support because of that. But there are many angles to explore on this issue, and the strongest papers found an approach to the topic that made it their own.
ReplyDeleteSome blogs of students who have written on this issue include:
http://studyingcollegeanxiety.blogspot.com/
http://college-shaylacarroll.blogspot.com/
http://bataffendy201.blogspot.com/
http://kristenbolen.blogspot.com/
http://collegedepression2.blogspot.com/
http://ronikab.blogspot.com/
http://collegecommutingadvantages.blogspot.com/
My topic of entering Undecided has some aspects that can relate to your topic of Mental Health. The two terms that are brought up in almost all the sources I have looked at so far are "indecisive" and "undecided." Indecisive students are not only undecided about their major, but also are indecisive about how they want to pursue their academic career and their life outside of academics. In "A Profile of Undecided College Students" by Willard C. Lewallen discusses how anxiety can lead to indecision which can be detrimental, "Of all the correlates of indecision in the re-search literature, the variable found most often associated with indecision has been anxiety. Goodstein (1965) describes two types of undecided students based on anxiety. For the first type, anxiety stems from failure to have made an educational or vocational choice. In other
ReplyDeletewords, the anxiety is brought about by not having developed adequate decision-making
skills. This type of anxiety is viewed as playing a minor role in the indecision problem.
For the second type of undecided student, anxiety is a major reason for indecision" (8). It may be interesting to look into how anxiety and depression not only effects a students grades, but their ambitions and career-making decisions.
Link: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED375738.pdf#page=13