Congratulations to Noemi and Premjeet in the Upper Sixth who have had their research paper exploring the effects of lockdown on teenagers’ physical and mental wellbeing, published by Public Health in Practice, the official journal of the Royal Society for Public Health.
“Last March, as the first lockdown began, we decided to use our time to find out how this drastic new change in lifestyle would affect the physical and mental health of people our own age. The initial study design and conception involved enlisting participants, devising suitable questionnaires and considering any ethical implications of our study.
The study took place over eight weeks, during which 55 participants completed a total of ten questionnaires. We collected both quantitative and qualitative data which we analysed and processed, producing graphical representations of the results and carrying out statistical tests in order to prove the significance of our findings.
Our overall results showed that despite certain positive effects, the overall impact of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic has been negative, regarding both physical and mental health, for this cohort of young people. 70% of participants experienced a decline in their physical health and 51% of participants relayed a decline in their mental health.
After we had processed and analysed all our data, we put this all in writing to include an in-depth description of the methods used, their respective strengths and weaknesses and a discussion of our findings and their relevance to public health. This was followed by a rigorous peer-review process during which we made multiple revisions to ensure the highest possible quality of our work.
After a year of hard work, we got our paper accepted by the Elsevier journal ‘Public Health in Practice’ which is one of the official journals of the Royal Society of Public Health. We are ecstatic about this news and are very excited to see our work published for others to read and to hopefully advance the knowledge of the effects of the pandemic on teenagers in secondary education”.
Click here to read their paper.
