Check out this blog post I wrote for the UCD Office of Public Scholarship and Engagement on when a challenge can also be an opportunity: doing community-engaged research during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of this research was to identify differences in perceived stress and personal resilience across race, gender, and different types of stressors (i.e., rent/mortgage stress) for a sample of U.S. residents experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic. This study used a cross-sectional, convenience sampling design for primary survey data collected over 10 weeks starting in April 2020 (n = 374).

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to increase social, economic, and psychological risks, including increased perceived stress – or the degree to which a person perceives a stressor and their ability to cope with it. The current study uses novel data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic to assess the role of a range of demographic and disaster-related experiential variables on perceived stress (n = 744). Hierarchical linear regression indicates that women experience greater perceived stress than men and as age and educational attainment increase, perceived stress decreases.

New research identifies sociodemographic predictors of depression for a rural population in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to enhance mental health disaster preparedness. This research used t-tests to differentiate between gender and ethnicity groups regarding depression status; binary logistic regression to identify socio-demographic characteristics that predict depression status; and t-test to differentiate between average depression scores, measured by the PHQ-9, pre-COVID-19 pandemic (2019) and after it’s start (2020).

Published in the American Psychology Association's Traumatology journal this month, our research identifies whether there were statistically significant changes in depression severity for rural residents in the United States before the COVID-19 pandemic and after its start in 2020.

Few studies investigating disaster have examined the risks associated with surviving both disaster and intimate partner violence (IPV). IPV is psychological or physical abuse in a personal relationship. Using an intersectional approach, the purpose of this study is to investigate contributions to and differences in perceived stress and personal resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic among a sample of predominantly female-identified IPV survivors (n = 41) to examine risks associated with this vulnerable population during disaster.