Mental Health among College Students during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Study of Gender and Locale Differences

The investigation entitled “Mental Health among college students during COVID-19 pandemic: A study of Gender and Locale Differences” aimed to assess the mental health among college students. The study was conducted on a sample of 500 college students in the age range of 19-21 years studying in various undergraduate programmes offered by different rural and urban colleges of Ludhiana district of Punjab. The sample was equally divided between the two genders (250 males & 250 females) and locale (250 rural & 250 urban). The sample was randomly drawn from the selected colleges that were partially operating during the pandemic. A set questionnaire was distributed to each respondent comprising of Mental Health Battery by Singh and Sengupta (2000) and a General Information Sheet. Later, the scoring was done and the results were tabulated. Results revealed that in the overall mental health scores, the male students performed better than the female students, the rural students performed better than the urban students and rural females performed significantly better than that of urban females.