Undergraduate Student Stress, Sleep, and Health Before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, undergraduate students experienced sleep problems and mental health issues that were negatively associated with academic achievement. Studies comparing undergraduate sleep and health pre- to mid-pandemic have yielded mixed results, necessitating additional research on other cohorts and examination of potential moderators. The present study was conducted to examine whether American undergraduate students tested mid-pandemic experienced poorer sleep, health, and academic achievement relative to students tested pre-pandemic, as well as to examine whether poor sleep during the pandemic was preferentially associated with poorer health in women. The current cross-sectional study included 217 participants tested pre-pandemic (February-December 2019) and a separate sample of 313 participants tested mid-pandemic (November-December 2020). Participants in both samples provided demographic information and completed questionnaires inquiring about participant sleep quality, insomnia, and cumulative grade point average (GPA); participants in the mid-pandemic sample also reported on measures of general, physical, and mental health. Participants tested mid-pandemic reported poorer global sleep quality, greater insomnia severity, greater stress, and higher cumulative GPAs relative to participants tested pre-pandemic. For the mid-pandemic sample only, poorer sleep quality was associated with reduced physical health; interactions indicated that women with poor sleep quality reported poorer mental health relative to both women with good sleep quality and men with poor quality sleep. Perceived stress mediated the association between sleep problems and GPA. These findings indicate that the pandemic negatively impacted the functioning of undergraduate students and highlights the need for future studies examining additional moderators of the reported effects.

Keywords:

• Pandemic
• stress
• sleep
• health
• well-being

Data availability statement

De-identified data from the mid-pandemic sample are available from the first author upon request; de-identified data from the pre-pandemic sample cannot be released due to restrictions placed on these data by our Institutional Review Board (IRB).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Institutional information

Each of the authors was affiliated with the Department of Psychological Science, UC Irvine, when this work was conducted.

Notes

1 The procedure for collecting age information for the club athletes and non-club athletes differed in the pre-pandemic sample: whereas club athletes entered their ages into text boxes, non-club athletes responded to a multiple choice question with responses ranging from 18 years old to over 25 years old. We computed a continuous age variable for the four athletes were who over 25 years old and replaced the missing data for the three non-athletes who were over 25 years old with this value (i.e., 26 years old).

Additional information

Funding

Data collection for the pre-pandemic sample was supported in part by a small grant to from the UC Irvine Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).