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) |
-- Run this code to view the data in students
SELECT *
FROM students;SELECT todep, inter_dom
FROM public.students
WHERE todep IS NOT NULL AND inter_dom = 'Inter'
ORDER BY todep DESC
LIMIT 10;I ran the above query to better understand the todep scoring range for international students, as I was not sure if the scoring was out of 10, 25, 50, 100 or etc.
-- Start coding here...
SELECT stay,
COUNT(stay) AS count_int,
ROUND(AVG(todep),2) AS average_phq,
ROUND(AVG(tosc),2) AS average_scs,
ROUND(AVG(toas),2) AS average_as
FROM public.students
WHERE inter_dom = 'Inter'
GROUP BY stay
ORDER BY stay DESC;I next ran the above code, to find the correlation between the depression and stress of international students. We can see the by the above data that the international students had higher levels of depression, but not as high levels of stress.