Literature Review 5

1.

2.

Tinto, Vincent.

Vincent Tinto’s Leaving College : Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1987. N. pag.print.

3. This book is a detailed exploration of the many reasons students choose to drop out of school. This goes through every possible explanation for the drop-out rates and offers some prevention methods as well as methods on how to make students feel more welcome. The big point is that the main reason college students leave college is because of a lack of adequate social interaction and connectivity with their school.
4. Vincent Tinto is a professor of Education and Sociology at Syracuse University. This book is widely read and recognized and has gotten many awards. There is extensive information about him here: http://soe.syr.edu/about/member.aspx?fac=64
5. Key Terms:
1. Leavers: This refers to the students who eventually drop out of college. 
2. Persisters: Refers to the students who overcome all of the adversary factors and graduate college

6. Quotes:
1.  “The absence of sufficient contact with other members of the institution proves to be the single most important predictor of eventual departure” (56).
2. “Many isolates relied more heavily on high school friends, family, or friends from work. Over time it grew more unlikely that these women would form friendships on campus” (110).
3. “Voluntary leavers were much less likely than were persisters to identify someone on campus with whom they had a significant relationship and or served as a significant definer of their actions” (56).

7. This book is important as one of the main components of my paper is the effect of social isolation on low-income college students' mental health and success in college. It provides a framework for just how influential social interaction and a sense of belonging is in every students' experience in college. Tinto just puts social isolation and its effect on mental health into perspective by his assertion that it is the single most important indicator in whether or not a student will complete college.

Final Blog: Why Low-Income College Students are at risk for Depression

Abstract:

This paper is a speculative piece on how depression in college is not only a common occurrence but that it is more likely to occur in certain populations of students. This paper focuses on low-income college students and the factors which make them more susceptible to depression in college. Firstly, it explore why college is a harmful mental health environment for everyone and comprises of quotes from other scholars who study college depression. It then launches into the fact that college is set up against those who are not wealthy enough to afford college without crippling loans and debt and how this instills an unease in lower-income students. This leads to financial strain, social isolation, and risk for drop-out from school. Becker, who believes stress is a myth that we have latched on to in order to avoid facing bigger, more systematic issues. The paper concludes with ideas to help prepare low-income students for what awaits them in college and programs/ideas to sustain their resilience while in school in order for them to succeed against the odds.


Bibliography:

Armstrong, Elizabeth and Laura Hamilton. Paying for the Party:

How College Maintains Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2013. Print

Aselton, Pamela.

"Sources Of Stress And Coping In American College Students Who Have Been Diagnosed With Depression." Journal Of Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing 25.3 (2012): 119-123. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Mar. 2015.

Becker, Dana.

“Does ‘Stress’ Hide Deeper Social Problems?”  One Nation under Stress: The Problem with Stress as an Idea.  Oxford UP, 2013.

Davis, Dannielle. Warfield, Markeba. (2011) The Importance of Networking in the Academic and Professional Experiences of Racial Minority Students in the USA, Educational Research and Evaluation: An International Journal on Theory and Practice, 17:2, 97-113, DOI:10.1080/13803611.200.597113

Klibert, Jeffrey, et al.

"Resilience Mediates The Relations Between Perfectionism And College   Student Distress." Journal Of Counseling & Development 92.1 (2014): 75-82. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 Feb. 2015.’

Mounsey, Rebecca, Michael A. Vandehey, and George M. Diekoff.   

"Working And Non-Working University Students: Anxiety, Depression, And Grade Point Average." College Student Journal 47.2 (2013): 379-389. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Mar. 2015.

Narduzzi, Arianna. The Creative Process, Suicide Research. retrieved from: https://ariannanarduzzicas110.wordpress.com/

Ross, Ramona, Schools Within the Community Lecture (2015) Retrieved from: https://content.sakai.rutgers.edu/access/content/group/62f1ece5-cfe3-419b-aeb0-345dab3ed3a3/Lectures/Lecture%204%20to%20Post.pdf

Serido, Joyce, et al. "Financial Adaptation Among College Students: Helping Students Cope With Financial Strain." Journal Of College Student Development 3 (2014): 310. Project MUSE. Web. 30 Apr. 2015.

Tinto, Vincent. Vincent Tinto’s Leaving College : Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1987. N. pag.print.

Walsemann, Katrina M., Gilbert C. Gee, and Danielle Gentile. "Sick Of Our Loans: Student Borrowing And The Mental Health Of Young Adults In The United States." Social Science & Medicine 124.(2015): 85-93. ScienceDirect. Web. 30 Apr. 2015.

This paper can be found at:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13FkI6YewtqTU81d2jvVGHQ4MPrJrdPUDlTVEY6ZrPkk/edit

Research post 9

Counter argument:

My argument for this paper was one of why lower SES college students are at a high risk for depression. I focused on the idea as a whole so one of my resources, Jeffrey Kilbert et al's, "Resilience Mediates The Relations Between Perfectionism And College  Student Distress" the focus is on an individual's level of resilience and ability to deal with stressful situations. I believe resilience does play a role in depression in college students to a certain extent. However, Dana Becker's ideas in "“Does ‘Stress’ Hide Deeper Social Problems?” gave me a completely different viewpoint. The system of Education itself is to blame and its unfair that Education has become another disadvantage for the poor. Why should they be exposed to this high depression- risk environment in the first place? So in keeping with her idea that a system-wide change needs to occur, I settled on a happy medium. The school should have a responsibility to provide mental health services as well as networking opportunities for all of its students so as to rectify the -as of now- myth of equality for all classes by way of Education and hard work.

Research Blog #8

Interview:

I've interviewed my roommate, Kali. She has experience with depression and I felt like her viewpoint was well-needed in writing this paper. She is a low income student who works part time on the weekends. I needed some kind of solid confirmation that there was something about college that had the potential to create depression in young students or to make it worse in those already suffering from it. In the case of my roommate, she was already diagnosed with depression and the environment of college as well as the pressures to do well, while being financially responsible for herself was a heavy burden to bear. A lot of what I wrote about is only inference from what I know of depression and its symptoms. Some interesting quotes:

1. When did you first start to experience symptoms of depression? K: When I was 16. It was Constant sadness and mood swings. I couldn’t eat when I was depressed. I ate too much when I was stressed.  

2.

What was your experience with depression in college? K: Being depressed all the time I felt like I couldn’t handle stress would get overwhelmed by the smallest things. I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone about what was going on. And it seemed like everything was happing at once, causing deeper depression.

3. Do Feel like it affected your work? K:  Yes for first two years It negatively affected my grades. They went down and I felt like they couldn’t go back up.

4. How did you cope with depression? K: Crying, Drinking wine, Alienated myself.

5. Do you think your depression got worse in college? K: Yes it got worse this year. Why? Me constantly comparing myself to others. I felt like I wasn’t where I needed to be. I felt like I was behind and I wouldn’t get to where I wanted to be.

This may not seem like much, but so much can be inferred from this interview from her. Depression may be an individual issue of a person who lacks resilience or it may be a systematic issue that could affect anyone's mental state negatively.

 

 

Research Blog 7 "Case"

My main example is  "Paying For the Party" by Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton right now. I really like the idea of the social class breakdown and how even subtle differences in class status can still cause a major difference in outcome of the worth of going to college in the first place. Paying for the Party outlines why privatized universities are so harmful for working class students of average intelligence (for that particular university) who expect to experience a big change in their socioeconomic status after attaining a degree from one of these schools. This book tells us that these colleges accept the working class students into their schools but that they really stand to benefit wealthy students from which they can also benefit from in a reciprocal fashion. From here I take minor research from other articles to frame the big picture: Working Class students who wish to experience upward mobility on the "professional pathway" are likely to experience stressors which can lead to depression.

Research Blog #6 visual

This graph is a good illustration of the trend of increasing mental health concerns each year in students. It also shows just how common these mental health disturbances are and that these are only the cases that sought out help. This suggests that there are likely more unknown cases of mental health issues.

Literature Review 4

1. Pamela Aselton, "Sources of Stress and Coping in American College Students who Have Been Diagnosed With Depression"

2.

Aselton, Pamela.

 "Sources Of Stress And Coping In American College Students Who Have Been       Diagnosed With Depression." Journal Of Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing 25.3 (2012): 119-123. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Mar. 2015.
3. This piece is a Psychology study on college aged students. The research method conducted here was to survey the students about their preferred way of coping with stress and the most common/influential causes of that stress. This study gets into what about the college environment it is that causes such high stress as well as the unhealthy ways students deal with such as drug use, binge drinking etcetera.
4. The author, Pamela Aselton has information provided on ResearchGate with many of her achievements and qualifications listed publicly as most of these researchers do. She has a PHD and is employed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in the School of Nursing. She has 21 publications on research gate and so I deem her to be a pretty good source on the topic of stress and its effects.
5. Sources of stress- issues/ factors that caused college students noticeable distress. These included: Roommate Problems, Academic Troubles, Financial and Career Concerns,  and Family Pressures (121).
Coping Methods-things students did to better handle the stress caused by the above. These methods included: Journaling, Marijuana, Music, Talk Therapy, Physical Activities and many more (122).
6. Quotes:
1. "Depression has increasingly been diagnosed in the college age population, with the American College Health Association reporting that 16% of all college students suffer from depression at some point in their college years" (119).
2. "College students are functioning in increasingly competitive environments with fewer job opportunities at graduation, which may increase their stress level and lead to feelings of depression" (119).
3. "This survey found that one in four college students admitted to using marijuana within the last year" (122).

7. I think this study could contribute nicely to my topic as it gives me some evidence of the point I am trying to make especially that of my point that new cases of depression are being increasingly diagnosed. The stress factors could be an entire paragraph of my paper as I really want to get into what specifically about college is so stressful as to induce/ worsen depression. This study gives me a frame for that purpose.