Testing a Brief Social Belonging Intervention to Improve Social Relationships and Well-Being during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Dr. Jenalee Doom, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Denver, and Dr. Christopher Rozek, Assistant Professor of Education at Washington University in St. Louis, have completed their research developing, testing, and implementing interventions for helping high school students cope with social and emotional problems during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their research, supported by an MRI grant, has produced interesting and very positive results.
Drs. Doom and Rozek partnered with administrators and teachers to survey a large number, approximately 3500, of high school students, to assess their social and emotional functioning throughout the school year. They then worked to implement online interventions in classrooms as part of their regular curriculum, which allowed thousands of students to participate in the interventions to improve social and emotional functioning.
Students told them that after academics and mental/physical health, maintaining friendships was their biggest challenge during the early pandemic lockdowns. After friendships, students reported that family-related concerns and a loss of social connection/community were major challenges for them.
Due to the significant challenges that students reported in the social domain, the researchers developed new interventions specific to the COVID-19 pandemic context in order to improve social relationships and emotional functioning in students. These interventions are unique in that they are free for schools, only involve four 20-30-minute sessions over the school year and does not require significant teacher training.
The brief intervention helped students learn how to change their emotions when appropriate. The intervention was delivered through a survey platform, which allowed teachers to deliver the intervention in class simply by sending students to a web link. At the beginning of the school year, they surveyed students about their mental health, relationships, and school motivation. They then began the intervention, which involved students reading content and answering prompts. These interventions included 2 sessions that were 20-30 minutes each and delivered 2 weeks apart.
Originally, they had created two interventions and pitted them against each other: the first focused on learning about and changing emotions, especially during social conflicts with friends and family, and the second focused on school belonging. The study findings indicated that the emotion-focused intervention was superior for improving mental health, relationships, and motivation. They then used only the emotion focused intervention.
They found that their intervention was especially effective at reducing depressive symptoms for students from lower-income backgrounds. Given that students from lower-income backgrounds often report higher depressive symptoms, this finding suggests that the intervention may reduce the disparity in depressive symptoms by socioeconomic status.
For the third and fourth activities of the school year following the initial intervention, students are guided through an online thought record activity. Students first identify a situation that upset them in the last 2 weeks and write down the main negative thought running through their head. They then come up with evidence supporting and against their negative thought. Then they write down what they should tell themselves if they deal with this problem again in the future. Both before and after the thought record, the students rate to what degree they believe their old and new thoughts about the situation and the intensity of their emotions about the situation.
Their overall results demonstrated that the thought records were effective at
reducing students’ negative beliefs, and students overwhelmingly reported this activity to be helpful. The thought records help students to work through social challenges with friends, romantic partners, and family, and reduce the negative beliefs they have surrounding relationship challenges.
These findings were presented at the Society for Research in Child Development’s Biennial conference, the Midwestern Psychological Association’s conference, and the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association’s conference. Drs. Doom and Rozek will be submitting several manuscripts on this project for publication in the coming months.