Psychological Distress among Socially Advantaged and Socially Disadvantaged College Students: Main and Interaction Effects of Social Status, Gender, and Residential Location

Description

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22023715

Aviral Goswami and Roshan Lal Zinta (Department of Psychology, Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh)

Psychological distress is highly prevalent among college students, but its distribution across social status, gender, and residential location has rarely been modelled jointly. Methods. Four hundred college students of District Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, completed the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales in a 2 (social status: advantaged, disadvantaged) × 2 (gender: boys, girls) × 2 (location: rural, urban) between-subjects design with 50 participants per cell. Depression, anxiety, stress, and the composite DASS total were analysed by factorial ANOVA, and partial eta squared was computed for every effect. Location was significant on all four measures, with the largest effect on stress, partial η² = .173. Social status was significant on anxiety, stress, and the composite, but not on depression. Gender produced no significant main effect on any measure, all partial η² ≤ .002. The Social Status × Location interaction was significant on all four measures and was the largest single effect for depression, anxiety, and the composite, partial η² = .030, .062, and .142 respectively. The three-way interaction was significant for stress, partial η² = .031, and for the composite, partial η² = .011. Interaction plots showed a reversal: distress rose with disadvantage in rural students but fell with disadvantage in urban students, the socially advantaged urban group returning the highest composite score in the study. The assumption of a uniform social gradient in student distress does not hold in this population. Screening and service allocation in urban colleges should not be restricted to students identified as socially disadvantaged.