Analyzing Students' Mental Health

Does going to university in a different country affect your mental health? A Japanese international university surveyed its students in 2018 and published a study the following year that was approved by several ethical and regulatory boards.

The study found that international students have a higher risk of mental health difficulties than the general population, and that social connectedness (belonging to a social group) and acculturative stress (stress associated with joining a new culture) are predictive of depression.

In this project, I explored the students data using PostgreSQL to find out if I would come to a similar conclusion for international students and see if the length of stay is a contributing factor.

Here is a description of the columns:

Field Name	Description
`inter_dom`	Types of students (international or domestic)
`japanese_cate`	Japanese language proficiency
`english_cate`	English language proficiency
`academic`	Current academic level (undergraduate or graduate)
`age`	Current age of student
`stay`	Current length of stay in years
`todep`	Total score of depression (PHQ-9 test)
`tosc`	Total score of social connectedness (SCS test)
`toas`	Total score of acculturative stress (ASISS test)

DataFrameas

students

variable

-- Viewing the data in students

SELECT * 
FROM students;

DataFrameas

df

variable

-- Finding the number of international students and their average scores for certain mental health difficulties, ordered by the length of stay (descending)

SELECT stay, 

       COUNT(*) count_int,
	   
       ROUND(AVG(todep), 2) average_phq, 
	   
       ROUND(AVG(tosc), 2) average_scs, 
	   
       ROUND(AVG(toas), 2) average_as
	   
	   
FROM students

WHERE inter_dom = 'Inter'

GROUP BY stay

ORDER BY stay DESC;

Therefore, after analyzing these data, I came to the conclusion that studying in another country significantly increased the risk of students having certain mental health problems, and the longer they stayed, the more it affected them.