Literature Review Blog #4

Cooke, Richard, Michael Barkham, Kerry Audin, Margaret Bradley, and John Davy. "Student Debt and Its Relation to Student Mental Health." Journal of Further and Higher Education 28.1 (2004): 53-66. Web.

Summary

This paper basically analyses the relationship between attitudes toward debt and the mental health of university graduates in the UK. The study showed that students became more concerned about their finances as they moved on through university and that their attitudes toward debt were related to their mental health levels. The study also found that students who had high financial concerns possessed significantly lower grades than students with low financial concerns. Students with high financial concerns felt more "tense, anxious, or nervous," more "criticized by other people," and found it more "difficult getting to sleep or staying asleep" than students with low financial concerns. They also found evidence to suggest that students with high worry about their debt anticipated leaving school with higher debt that low debt worry students. However, the study found no relation between anticipated debt and mental health. Basically what that means is, economic and demographic factors do not appear to predict mental health, but rather, a student's level of concern over finances shows the relationship. 

Authors

Richard Cooke, Michael Barkham, Kerry Audin, and Margaret Bradley- work in the Psychological Therapies Research Center in the School of Psychology at the University of Leeds

John Davy- works at the School of Computing at the University of Leeds

Key Terms

high financial concerns- shown to have a relationship with lower grades and more mental health problems

low financial concern- shown to have a relationship with better grades and less mental health issues

Quotes

"The increase in the cost of university appears to have impacted on students' debt tolerance. Work by Lea et al. (2001) indicates that students become more debt-tolerant as they progress through higher education. In contrast, the current data show that students become more concerned with finances as they progress through university... [the main] reason for the difference is the situation students in the present study, with most students having to take loans to pay for higher education, and these loans being much larger than in 1995. "(Cooke et al. pg 62-3)

"financial concerns are heightened as students complete their degrees" (Cooke et al. pg 63) 

"Examining the pattern of results for the comparisons between the high, low, and no debt worry groups suggests that the high worry group are not necessarily more worried about things in general." (Cooke et al. pg 64)

"The one difference between students with low and no debt worry was that students with low debt worry had less feeling that they had achieved things they wanted to compared to students with no debt worry. This interesting finding suggests that although the low debt worry students are not suffering worsened mental health due to their debt, they may be prevented from doing desired activities by their debt." (Cooke et al. pg 64)

Value

This is one of the most useful articles I have found. It is an in depth study on the actual factors that are related to my paper rather than just student debt and mental health. This article, along with the article mentioned by Lea et. al for comparison, will be crucial in delving deeper into the actual effects of student debt on mental health.