For her honors thesis, Taylor Reinsel, senior biology major, is studying resiliency, psychology and people’s well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. Reinsel studied responses of about 100,000 participants in the COVID-19 Participant Experience survey from the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program.
“I thought it would be really cool if we could take all these questionnaires and essentially go through them and compare people’s resilience to their psychological well-being to their COVID-19 well-being during this time, to see if there’s any relation between these variables. So that’s exactly what I did,” Reinsel said.
To study the data, Reinsel had to get certified by the National Institutes of Health and learn its coding software to sort through the data.
“I didn’t know how to code before this. I never thought I would learn how to code. I was a biology major,” Reinsel said. “I was attending online meetings from professors from out of state just trying to learn. It was definitely a big hurdle, but I couldn’t be prouder of the work that I put into it towards the end.”
Reinsel’s research started with Leanne Boucher and Matthew Collins, professors in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and Reinsel’s research mentors. Reinsel helped them with data collection, and they were able to turn their findings and research into her honors thesis.
“She was really impressive. She did her reading every week. She was always prepared,” Collins said. “We were putting together a paper examining some data that already existed, and Taylor really helped do a lot of the literature review for that.”
From her research, Reinsel concluded that there is a correlation between resilience, psychological well-being and COVID-19 well-being.
“We can’t tell about causation, but we can tell that these variables do have a connection, which means that resilience, COVID-19 well-being and psychological well-being are connected,” Reinsel said.
Reinsel hopes her work will inspire more research in resilience.
“The connection between these variables is so obvious and it’s only the beginning. Research into resilience is so neglected, I feel like, in the field of positive psychology, and it’s something that could help so many individuals,” Reinsel said.
Collins also hopes that the research inspires other students to conduct studies of their own.
“It really is impressive to see an undergraduate student do this kind of research. It also opens up other students to see that there’s data out there. You don’t necessarily have to design your own experiment,” Collins said.
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