Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Feb 4, 2021
Date Accepted: Jul 27, 2021
Understanding Mental Health App Use Among Community College Students: Online Survey
ABSTRACT
Background:
Mental health concerns are a significant issue among community college students, and they often have less access to resources than traditional university college students. Mobile apps have the potential to increase access to mental health care, but there has been little research investigating factors associated with mental health app use within the community college population.
Objective:
This study aimed to understand facilitators of and barriers to using mental health apps among community college students.
Methods:
An online survey was administered to a randomly selected sample of 500 community college students from April 16 to June 30, 2020. Structural equation modeling was used to test the relationships between the use of mental health apps, perceived stress, perceived need to seek help for mental health concerns, perceived stigma, past use of professional mental health services, privacy concerns, and social influence of other people in using mental health apps.
Results:
Twenty-one (21%) percent of participants reported use of mental health apps. Perceived stress, perceived need to seek help, past use of professional services, and social influence were positively associated with mental health app use. Furthermore, the effect of stress was mediated by a perceived need to seek help. Privacy concerns were negatively associated with mental health app use. Stigma, age, and gender did not have a statistically significant effect.
Conclusions:
These findings can inform development of new digital interventions and appropriate outreach strategies to engage community college students in using mental health apps.
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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.