Assessing the Mental Health of International Students at Penn State

Open Access
- Author:
- Ward, Alexandra
- Area of Honors:
- Global and International Studies
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Yuliya Ladygina, Thesis Supervisor
Krista Brune, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- mental health
international students
penn state - Abstract:
- Penn State prides itself for hosting a diverse community of students at its University Park campus. Individuals from many different countries travel to Penn State each year to engage in undergraduate, graduate, and PhD coursework. This research seeks to assess how international students are emotionally supported by the university as they acclimate to a new country, environment, and culture. A total of eight international students participated in this research: three from Turkey, and one each from Indonesia, Russia, Egypt, Kuwait, and Brazil. The interview begins with a general assessment of the student’s emotional well-being using a structured narrative approach where they are asked to describe their life before Penn State, and their life now. This is directly followed by a self-report measurement of their fundamental emotional state using the Differentiated Emotions Scale (DES). The DES was created by American research psychologist Carroll Izard in 1977 as a way to measure the mood of an individual during a specific life experience. The life experience measured in this research study is the student’s time at Penn State. The students are asked a series of twenty questions, each consisting of three adjectives associated with either a positive or negative emotion. They rate the frequency to which they have experienced this emotion at Penn State from 0-4, using the respective DES system. The results are positive as majority of the interviewees associate more positive than negative emotions when reflecting on their time at Penn State. However, more than half of the students associate some type of negative emotion when considering their experience with legal questions and the International Students and Scholars Advising (ISSA) office. I propose three possible solutions to better support international students on the University Park campus.