Abstract
The present study found evidence that essential workers and their families are at an increased risk for anxiety, stress and sleep disruption. 120 female adolescents and 55 of their parents completed surveys measuring anxiety and sleep quality during the COVID-19 pandemic. The two samples, although drawn from the same community, were not linked. All adolescents attend an all-girls academy in suburban New York. T-tests and regression analyses suggest that essential workers and their families are at elevated risk for mental illness. KEY WORDS - Anxiety - Mental Health - COVID-19 - Frontline Workers - Sleep Quality INTRODUCTION - Due to the current pandemic, the stress levels of many people throughout the world have grown. Numerous studies show that one’s anxiety ofGeneralized Anxiety Disorder and Sleep Quality during the COVID-19 Outbreak in Adolescents & Parents: A Web-Based Cross-Sectional Survey Kaylin Spinelli ten becomes heightened during disease outbreaks (Tausczik et al. 2012). Every individual copes with stress and anxiety differently, and they are brought on in different people at different times. Some cope with anxiety and stress by sleeping more, while others find it difficult to fall asleep at all during stressful or anxious times. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased anxiety in more people than have most other diseases, in large part because people have been confined to their homes for extended periods of time (Pfefferbaum and North 2020). Teens typically are developmentally prone to high anxiety levels (Henker et al. 2002). At their age, it is natural to worry about peer acceptance and academic performance (Henker et al. 2002). Gupta et al. (2020) found that during the lockdown phase of the pandemic, many individuals began to reduce their hours of nighttime sleep in favor of taking more midday naps. This pattern slowly undermined peoples’ mental health (Gupta et al. 2020). A study of healthcare workers in Sudan found heightened anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic (Elamin 2020). This raises the question of, the extent to which the heightened anxiety levels of healthcare workers might affect their families. The present study examines not only the anxiety levels and sleep quality of individuals who self-identify as essential workers but also persons who self-identify as the child of an essential worker. Did these two groups report significantly higher COVID-19 related anxiety or more significantly disrupted sleep? Our study is a cross-sectional, web-based survey testing generalized anxiety disorder and sleep quality during the COVID-19 pandemic in adolescents and their parents. A similar study of adult workers - frontline and non-frontline - was conducted in China in March 2020 at the height of the pandemic. We intentionally followed similar research protocols to better compare our February 2021 results in New York with the February 2020 data collected by Chinese scholars. Huang & Zhao (2020) found that younger people and essential workers were at highest risk of mental illness due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The present research tests whether the mid-pandemic anxiety levels and sleep quality of essential workers and their children differed from that of their peers using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Survey (GAD-7) and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index questionnaire (PSQI).
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