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.
Explore the students data using PostgreSQL to find out if you would come to a similar conclusion for international students and see if the length of stay is a contributing factor.
Here is a data description of the columns you may find helpful.
| 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) |
-- First, we need to pull all the data from the columns on the students table to have a better top down view of what we are working with
SELECT *
FROM students;SELECT stay,
-- "stay" is selected as we are trying to find the amount of time that the international students are staying
COUNT(*) AS count_int,
-- Now we are going to count the number of international students in the data set
ROUND(AVG(todep), 2) AS average_phq,
ROUND(AVG(tosc), 2) AS average_scs,
ROUND(AVG(toas), 2) AS average_as
-- These three columns are mental health scores that depict different aspects that can potentially be correlated e.g. (depression, social connectedness, and acculturative stress)
FROM students
WHERE inter_dom = 'Inter'
-- This line specifically selects 'Inter', which is the chosen text for international student
GROUP BY stay
-- We then group by "stay" to determine whether the length of stay can be related to the scores of the 3 mental health results
ORDER BY stay DESC;