The Relationship of School Modality With Stress and Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Variation Across Sociodemographic Groups

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Pentious

The COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures harmed adolescents’ stress and mental health, with evidence suggesting poorer outcomes for students in remote or hybrid schooling than for those in fully in-person settings. Using survey data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, the analysis tests how race/ethnicity, household income, and neighborhood disadvantage shape the relationship between school modality and outcomes including perceived stress, sadness, and positive affect across 2020–2021.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages23

Reading Time58 min

AccessFree to download

Research Question

Data and Outcomes

Moderation by Demographics and Neighborhood Disadvantage

Implications for Mental Health Supports

AERA Open January-December 2025, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 1–23 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584251349182 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2025. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) The Relationship of School Modality With Stress and Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Variation Across Sociodemographic Groups Daniel Silver University of Southern California Morgan S. Polikoff University of Southern California Kiros Berhane Columbia University Annie Kwon University of Southern California Megan M. Herting Children’s Hospital Los Angeles University of Southern California Elizabeth R. Sowell Children’s Hospital Los Angeles University of Southern California David J.M. Kraemer Dartmouth College DanielA. Hackman University of Southern California The COVID-19 pandemic and school closures adversely affected adolescents’mental health and well-being, with the weight of evidence indicating worse outcomes for students attending school remotely or in a hybrid modality compared to fully in person. We leverage survey data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM Study (ABCD Study®) collected from 6,245 adolescents (mean age = 13.2) during the 2020–2021 school year to investigate the moderating effects of race/ethnicity, household income, and neighborhood disadvantage on the relationship between 2020–2021 school modality and outcomes including perceived stress, sadness, and positive affect. For relatively advantaged students, our results corroborate prior findings that students in remote or hybrid schooling report worse mental health outcomes than students who attended fully in person. However, this pattern between schooling modality and mental health disappears or reverses for relatively disadvantaged students. Given substantial within-group variation, these findings underscore the importance of considering varied student needs in developing mental health supports. Keywords: adolescence, disparities, stress/coping, hierarchical linear modeling, survey research, mental health, COVID-19, school modality Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages ([https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage](https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage)). Silver et al. The COVID-19 pandemic was a multisystemic stressor that had well-documented, devastating effects on United States youth across multiple domains (Gross & Hamilton, 2023; Lewis & Kuhfeld, 2023; Masten et al., 2020). Nearly all US schools closed for in-person learning in March 2020 for the remainder of the 2019–2020 school year. The 2020–2021 school year was marked by wide variation in students’school modality: some schools were open for fully in-person instruction, others only offered remote instruction like they had the previous spring, and others offered some mixture of the two (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2023) . Research suggests that preexisting achievement gaps widened (Cohodes et al., 2022; Lewis & Kuhfeld, 2023) and adolescent mental health worsened (Gross & Hamilton, 2023; Jones et al., 2022) during the 2020–2021 school year, with many experts linking remote schooling to the negative academic and mental health outcomes (Jack et al., 2023; Saulle et al., 2022). Additionally, available evidence shows that the pandemic’s physical and mental health effects were not evenly felt along lines of race/ethnicity, income, or neighborhood (Mackey et al., 2020; Xiao et

FAQs

What relationship does the study examine during the 2020–2021 school year?

It examines how access to in-person learning (school modality) relates to adolescents’ perceived stress, sadness, and positive affect.

Which factors are tested as moderators of school modality effects?

Race/ethnicity, household income, and neighborhood disadvantage are investigated for moderating effects on the modality–mental health relationship.

Do the study’s findings apply equally across student groups?

No. The pattern of worse mental health for remote/hybrid students holds for relatively advantaged students, but it disappears or reverses for relatively disadvantaged students due to substantial within-group variation.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Pentious