Planning an Analysis of Student Stress During a Pandemic: Adapting Bioanthropological Methods to Social Distance Guidelines

Abstract

Undergraduate college students are overworked and under great stress. Before the recent pandemic, we were interested in understanding this stress and its ramifications on our diet and health. Northern Arizona University (NAU) is an important place to do this type of research, as many first‐generation students enroll here. First‐generation students may have a difficult time asking for help with their studies and are more prone to dropping out of college than students with family college experience. As interns in a Biological Anthropology laboratory, we looked for ways to use bioanthropological methods to understand this stress andwererecently awarded funds from NAU to conduct human hair research on fellow students. We proposed to analyze both qualitative and quantitative data to determine the correlations between different aspects of a student's stress level, dietary habits, and health and plan to collaborate with a bioarchaeologist, an anthropological human biologist, and a hormone biologist to examine these correlations from as many angles as possible. With the COVID‐19 pandemic, we have had to restructure our methods and hypotheses to better account for the new stressors that are affecting students. In this commentary, we discuss the specifics of these new stressors students are facing ‐ including a modified school calendar and student job loss ‐ and propose best practices for biological research of this nature during a pandemic.