Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Aug 31, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 11, 2018 - Nov 6, 2018
Date Accepted: Nov 22, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Correlates of Stress in the College Environment Uncovered by the Application of Penalized Generalized Estimating Equations to Mobile Sensing Data
Background:
Stress levels among college students have been on the rise for the last few decades. Currently, rates of reported stress among college students are at an all-time high. Traditionally, the dominant way to assess stress levels has been through pen-and-paper surveys.
Objective:
The aim of this study is to use passive sensing data collected via mobile phones to obtain a rich and potentially less-biased source of data that can be used to help better understand stressors in the college experience.
Methods:
We used a mobile sensing app, StudentLife, in tandem with a pictorial mobile phone–based measure of stress, the Mobile Photographic Stress Meter, to investigate the situations and contexts that are more likely to precipitate stress.
Results:
Using recently developed methods for handling high-dimensional longitudinal data, penalized generalized estimating equations, we identified a set of mobile sensing features (absolute values of beta >0.001 and robust z>1.96) across the domains of social activity, movement, location, and ambient noise that were predictive of student stress levels.
Conclusions:
By combining recent statistical methods and mobile phone sensing, we have been able to study stressors in the college experience in a way that is more objective, detailed, and less intrusive than past research. Future work can leverage information gained from passive sensing and use that to develop real-time, targeted interventions for students experiencing a stressful time.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.