Social Factors in the Mental Health of Young Adults: Bridging Psychological and Network Analysis

Stanford University

Status: Invitation-only

Conditions: Loneliness; Depression; Anxiety; Stress

Treatments: Behavioral: Examination of students' naturally occurring social ties

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other; NIH

Identifiers

NCT04771195

24593

R01MH125974 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

Details and patient eligibility

About

The central goal of this project is to produce a novel, precise, and comprehensive account of social factors in young adult mental health - using a novel combination of network nominations, ecological momentary assessment, and neuroimaging methods. To that end, the investigators will collect data from two successive classes of college undergraduates (i.e., classes of 2023 and 2024) over the course of their collegiate tenure.

Full description

The proposed work will consist of four key components. The investigators will collect data from the class of 2023 in each of their remaining years at college, producing (i) longitudinal data that will allow them to probe the long-term mental health effects of connections made during the transition to college, as well as mental health issues and resilience in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as a function of social connectedness. The investigators will leverage this rich dataset to build (ii) prospective quantitative models to predict mental health outcomes later in college based on a range of social factors measured early in college. They will further collect (iii) a longitudinal replication cohort, the class of 2024, allowing to establish the robustness of their initial findings across samples. Finally, the investigators will add (iv) a neuroimaging component to this dataset in a subset of the class of 2024. This will allow them to examine brain "markers" of connectedness, and add them to a prospective model, providing a novel integration across brain, behavior, and community levels of analysis, and a synthetic assessment of social factors in long-term mental health.

Enrollment: 2,000 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Inclusion Criteria: Stanford undergraduate students in the classes of 2023 and 2024, as well as all students who reside in their dorms.

Exclusion Criteria: People under the age of 18

Trial design

Primary purpose: Basic Science

Allocation: N/A

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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2,000 participants in 1 patient group

Class of 2023 and 2024

Experimental group

Description:

Stanford undergraduate students who are expected to graduate in Spring of 2023 or 2024

Treatment:

Behavioral: Examination of students' naturally occurring social ties