-: Hi everybody, my name is Vivian Nguyen.
I am a psychology major
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
My project was advised by Dr. Jenna Finch
and for my McNair project,
we'll be looking at the "Association between Job Loss,
"Parental Mental Health and Parenting Behavior
"during the COVID-19 Pandemic."
First, we'll be going over the COVID-19 pandemic.
And then my purpose is my hypothesis,
methods and measurements
and then we're go into results, discussions
and then future research.
Looking at the COVID-19 pandemic,
it has brought a significant amount of stress to parents
around the United States,
which can have a dramatic effect on family.
COVID-19 cases continue
to increase rapidly in the United States.
There has been limited research done on the pandemic effect
of depression and anxiety because of pandemic is new
and is still currently going on.
Looking at my purpose,
the purpose of the study is to examine
whether parental underemployment is associated
with parental mental health
and consequently harsh and inconsistent discipline
towards young children.
Moving forward to my hypothesis,
my first hypothesis looks
at parents who experience job loss
during the pandemic will report higher levels
of depression and anxiety symptoms.
And then my second hypothesis states
that parents who experience higher levels of depression
and anxiety symptoms will report higher levels
of harsh and inconsistent discipline.
Moving on to background research,
past research indicates
that the great recession showed unemployment
was linked to a decline in mental health.
Past research also indicates
that when parents have a mental health condition,
the nature and the quality
of parenting are often disrupted.
And the lastly, past research has stated
that parents experiencing mental health distress
tend to become more punitive,
harsh, distanced and less nurturing with their children.
Moving forward to materials and methods.
Looking at our participants, we recruited 250 parents,
95.88% of them being females or mothers.
And then we also recruited participants
from the Lincoln-Nebraska areas
and in the surrounding area.
Moving forward to my independent variable.
My independent variable was employment change.
We used the parental report of job loss and under employment
to measure employment change.
And then for my dependent variable,
we looked at parental mental health, depression and anxiety.
To measure depression,
we looked at the CES-D scale and then to measure anxiety,
we looked at the PROMIS emotional distress,
and anxiety short form.
And then to measure parenting quality,
we looked at the scale of parent practice interviews.
And then for our control variables,
we looked at parent, gender and race.
Moving forward to our descriptive stats,
you can see that depression,
parents who suffered a consequence
of employment change due to COVID
were associated with a greater depression symptoms.
And then looking at anxiety,
the results confirms that employment change
was not significantly correlated with anxiety symptoms
and then moving on to parenting quality
of harsh and inconsistent discipline.
We looked at anxiety symptoms, depression symptoms,
and under employment.
There is no association between anxiety/depression
and harsh and inconsistent parenting.
So to discuss during COVID-19,
parents who reported under employment
reported higher rates of depressive symptoms
and anxiety symptoms on a trending level.
And then there's no association between parents
with mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety,
and parenting qualities.
And to conclude, COVID is not going away anytime soon,
the studies allows us to get a better understanding
of how this pandemic is potentially affecting parents
experiencing depression and anxiety,
along with their families.
And then for future research,
we'd like to include some more portions
of fathers and mothers.
As I stated before, 95.88% of the study was females.
And then lastly, we would like
to make this study more diverse
because on average, our participants were mainly white.
It was 93% white participants.
And then lastly,
I would like to acknowledge Dr. Jenna Finch
for being my UNL faculty member
and then my Graduate Student Mentor
and then lastly, the McNair Scholars Program.
Thank you.