Project Title: The Effect of the Pandemic on Mental Health in Populations of Domestic Abuse and Low Income Families
BASIS Advisor: John Hight
Internship Location: Arlington Psychological Services
Onsite Mentor: Mridu Tripathi
During the pandemic, the number of stressors on people increased significantly. People were locked in their homes, anxious about contracting the virus. Many people lost their jobs and were unable to feed their families. In addition, victims of domestic abuse were often stuck with their abusers with limited resources for help, putting them at both physical and mental risk. Since the pandemic is a new occurrence, the knowledge on the extent of the pandemic on various populations or disorders is limited. Arlington Psychological Offices has been continuously working to look at data provided by CDC, SAMSHA, and Arlington County sites to see the continuing effect of the pandemic on mental health in populations of low income and domestic abuse. Specifically, I will be working with them to evaluate which specific disorder increased and across which genders and age groups in these populations. I speculate that the pandemic has had a negative effect on the mental health of these populations. The disorders that I suspect would have spiked the most are anxiety and depression. This research will educate people on the importance of mental health resources towards public health as a whole, especially during the pandemic. The amount of resources available to people is not in accordance with the detrimental effects of the pandemic on mental health.
My Posts
Week 10: Final Week
May 18, 2021
Hi everyone! I can’t believe we are already on the final week. It is crazy how fast time flies. I spent this week working on my presentation and putting the final touches on my paper. I worked on cutting down my graphs, making my paper more clear and concise, and identifying any possible sources of […]
Week 9: Political Implications
May 10, 2021
Hi everyone! Welcome to week 9. As I said last week, my on-site mentor gave me suggestions on my final paper and I spent this week implementing them. I sent my second draft to her and she will show it to some of the other psychologists at the office. I am excited to talk to […]
Week 8: Revising
May 04, 2021
Welcome back everyone! I can’t believe we are already on week 8. It is so crazy that this project is coming to an end. I spent this week writing the discussion and conclusion section of my final paper. I discussed how the unemployment rate and poverty rate had the strongest correlations to depression during the […]
Week 7: Working on Final Conclusions
Apr 26, 2021
Hello again everyone! This will be a short post since I spent this week finishing the first draft of my final paper and sending it over to my advisor, so I didn’t make many new discoveries. Since my sample size was only 16 states and I had so many independent variables(covid-19 restrictions, unemployment rate change, […]
Week 6: Contradictions
Apr 16, 2021
Welcome to week 6! I hope everyone’s projects are going well. As I said last week, I spent part of this week looking at the technological barriers in rural areas that would prevent them from accessing telehealth. After collecting data from the National Center of Education, I found that the average percentage of households that […]
Week 5: Teletherapy
Apr 12, 2021
Hello again everyone! I can’t believe we are already on week 5. I spent this week finishing my regressions and starting my graphs and charts. I also have begun planning the format for my final paper. However, I wanted to spend this blog post talking about something interesting that I noticed which is the impact […]
Week 4: More Findings on the Urban-Rural Divide
Apr 05, 2021
Welcome back! I hope everyone had a good spring break. This week I was not able to do as much work as I hoped since I was moving houses and I had to unpack lots and lots of boxes. However, I did continue running regressions and two-sample t-tests and I found some cool results. Here […]
Week 3: Learning About Data Analysis
Mar 26, 2021
Hello Again Everyone! As I said last week, I met with my on-site mentor over the weekend to discuss my findings on intimate partner violence hotline calls across all 50 states during the pandemic. She advised me to use a smaller sample size and pick rural states with similar population densities, covid-19 restrictions and median […]
Week 2: Lots and Lots of Data
Mar 19, 2021
Welcome to week 2 of my project! As I have been reading literature the past two weeks, I have realized that populations of domestic violence and low-income families are particularly susceptible to poor mental health during the pandemic. Parents were forced to take on the new stressor of providing for their families while unemployed. Sudden […]
An Introduction To My Project
Mar 11, 2021
Hi! I’m Ria. I am working with the Arlington Psychological Offices to further my interest in psychology. My project is on the negative effects of the pandemic on mental health in populations of domestic abuse and low-income families. I will be looking at both Arlington and National Data to observe how rates of anxiety and […]