The Relationship between Social Connectedness and Perceived Stress during COVID-19 Lockdown in High School Students in Pathumwan District, Bangkok

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed hefty tolls upon humanity. Aside from tremendous fatalities and indelible damage inflicted upon the bodies of many recovered afflicted, lockdown and quarantine orders that it instigated have been shown by previous studies to have a psychological impact on humans. Ostensibly, gregarious animals like humans would lose the sense of belonging to society when occluded from the outside world, which is the case of lockdown and quarantine, and the loss thereof would precipitate negative mentalities. Measuring the former can be executed through the social connectedness scale, whereas one of the ways to gauge the latter is through the perceived stress scale. By conventional notion, perceived stress would have an inverted relationship with social connectedness, as suggested by previous studies. However, a long time has passed since they were conducted and sundry technologies have come to life ever since. People today, especially younger ones, are inclined to use these technologies for entertainment, and past research unveiled their efficacy in alleviating stress. This study was, therefore, commenced on the premise that low social connectedness during COVID-19 lockdown does not necessarily entail high stress among high school students in Thai schools in the Pathumwan district of Bangkok, who were of young ages and whose average household income exceeds that of many of their geographical counterparts. According to responses from the participants (n=374), there is no correlation between social connectedness and perceived stress, which supported the premise. While a conclusion can be drawn that technology use helps reduce the stress that would otherwise rise amidst the lockdown and would be responsible for the noncorrelation, more research is required to identify the clear cause of this astonishing outcome.