TL;DR
Project concerned with the analysis of mental health surveys of young teens as well as their faculty in building connections and social relationships as part of collective belonging through Data processing, analysis and visualizations. The project culminated successfully with a poster presentation to the clients as well as the BU Spark! Committee. Here are a few visualizations we obtained, for more info check out the resources down below:
Motivation
This project seeks to understand the relationship between mental, emotional, and behavioral (MEB) health and the stable experience of belonging. For this context, belonging is defined as a generative group of individuals working collaboratively in a system. In this case, the students and staff at St. Helens high school make up the groups and collectively make up the system. Our working theory is that if we increase belonging in both areas (groups and the system) it will lead to an improvement in MEB health. By collecting data from a student/staff population of 860, the goal will be to provide analysis of the data and look for specific trends and conclusions that can be made.
Key Questions
Since the project was under the mentorship of a client from ConnectED, we sought to seek answers to the objective key questions they posed such as :
- Are there key words in the answer to the survey question “how would you describe belonging?” What can inform us of the student perspective of belonging?
- How does the sense of community of both staff members and students collected on the google form survey correlate with the number and strength of connections made?
- Is there a correlation between connectedness (outgoing and incoming) and club, activity, and/or sports environment? and many such other questions.
We were able to successfully visualize important aspects of the data and present our findings on the BU Spark! Demo Day 2023.
Here is a picture of our team!
Conclusions
-
We have observed that we could make useful derivations from the description of belonging by the sample of people who responded to the survey, and get ideas about the public sentiment about MEB Health.
-
We explored the correlation between the Sense of Community Index score and the different features in the survey i.e. their bio descriptions, their location, sports, clubs and number/strength of connections. Especially, if someone has more incoming than outgoing, he will be more likely to have a stronger sense of belonging since more people want to build connections with them.
-
Interesting insights were obtained regarding highly connected clubs/sports and those with higher and lower SOC scores respectively.
-
The grammar and intensity used while describing bio descriptions (“love”, “like”, “sleep”, “tired” etc) can also point to meaningful relations with MEB health and Sense of Community.
-
With an increased dataset and new metrics for evaluating MEB health, we can surely form many more such correlations and solidify our understanding of MEB health in students and staff to a better degree.
Results
Check out these useful resources to know more!