Author: Sarah Dunlap
Spurred by troubling survey results, the Emmons Health Center has new resolve to educate Occidental students on techniques to ease stress and to improve their general health. Approximately 130 students answered a recent health center survey designed to pinpoint students’ collective needs and to identify ways in which Occidental health services might be improved. Among other issues, the survey results indicated that 85 percent of polled students would like to learn about stress management, 83 percent are concerned with their diet and 66 percent worry about their chronic lack of sleep.
These findings led to the planning of “Spring into Health Month,” which will relocate certain counseling services to the academic quad, conveniently in time for finals. “We’ll be down in the quad the week of April 16 and 23 and then the week of April 30,” Director of Counseling Services Ruth Tavlin said. “We’re going to have some activities there that will help decrease stress.”
Zara Ashikyan, a full-time psychologist at Emmons, hopes that by bringing services to the quad, Emmons will be able to reach more students. “The fastest way to get help to this many students is to do an outreach instead of inviting them to come to individual therapy sessions,” she said.
Ashikyan distributed the survey to get a better concept of the demand and need for health services. Moreover, she wanted to gauge the interest-levels of prospective health center events and services.
“We wanted to do an interest survey to find out what our students liked about the services we had and what they wanted more of,” Ashikyan said. “One of the things that we were most interested in were the topics of discussions or workshops that they’d be interested in.”
The survey listed a variety of workshops and asked students to identify classes they would potentially attend. Ranging from anger management to senior comps advice, the options were broad-based. Polled students showed the strongest interest in workshops that aim to help sleep deprivation, poor nutrition and procrastination.
Neither Ashikyan nor Tavlin were surprised by the survey results; they both said that this high rate of stress was standard. “Compared to other college campuses, [the results] are very similar,” Ashikyan said.
Tavlin had similar remarks and said that she anticipated these numbers based on her existing patients. “We weren’t surprised, because when students come here, they check off the problems they’re coming with,” she said. “We knew that students were concerned with anxiety.”
Tavlin and Ashikyan stressed that the poll is unscientific and that only nine Braun residents responded. Mathematics Professor Alan Knoerr agreed and said the study is not an accurate representation of the entire student body.
“Surveys conducted in this way have little validity from the perspective of statistical inference. That is, one could not reasonably infer from this that 85 percent of all Oxy students are “interested in finding creative ways of coping with recurring anxiety,” he said. “An appropriate sampling procedure would have been to conduct a random sample of an appropriate size, drawn from the entire student body, possibly stratified to ensure adequate ethnic and gender participation and with clearly understood safeguards for confidentiality.”
Still, Knoerr believes that this survey has valuable information and that the findings give Emmons a clear impetus to explore these issues further.
“The statistics are presumably correct for the students that did respond,” he said. “In a community of our size, this should be more than enough to justify Emmons increasing its education and outreach efforts to address these issues.”
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