Designing Dashboards for Campus Stakeholders to Support College Student Mental Health

Faculty: 
Munmun De Choudhury
Students: 
Dong Whi Yoo

Stakeholders, such as college campus administrators and clinicians, are committed to alleviating students' mental health concerns and the campus' mental health climate, but they suffer from a lack of timely and actionable information. Research has revealed that student personal data, such as self-tracking and social media data, can provide in-situ insights about students' mental health states. However, how they can support stakeholders' goals remains unexplored. We examine the potential of user-centered technology in addressing this challenge. We interviewed campus administrators and clinicians to understand their needs and current practices. Then through a paper prototype, we gathered design suggestions for stakeholder-facing dashboards. We generated three design implications revealed through our studies: that social media can be a potentially useful resource for understanding student mental health albeit concerns of data reliability and interpretability; that the dashboards need to assuage stakeholders' concerns around bias and intelligibility of the visual presentations, which can become barriers to future adoption; and that ethical considerations, particularly securing privacy of student data, need to be salient in the design.

Lab: 
Director: 
Munmun De Choudhury
Faculty: 
Munmun De Choudhury

The SocWeB Lab's mission is to develop novel computational techniques, and technologies powered by these techniques, to responsibly and ethically employ social media in quantifying, understanding, and improving our mental health and well-being.