Adrienne Shum

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed the lives of children and adolescents, forcing them into periods of prolonged social isolation and time away from school. Understanding the psychological consequences of the UK’s lockdown for children and adolescents is essential so that appropriate support can be implemented.

Interpretation
In this visualisation, I focused on the mental health outcomes as measured by the Strengths & Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). This is a well-validated behavioural screening questionnaire. Percentages in this data vis refers to the proportion of children in our sample who were likely to meet the diagnostic criteria for emotion problems (e.g. anxiety or depression), conduct problems (e.g. conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder) or hyperactivity/inattention problems (e.g. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; ADHD).

I first tidied the messy dataset to calculate percentages.

wholesample <- dataSDQcase_long %>%

  filter(Severity != "NA") %>%

   filter(Time_Month != "NA") %>%

    dplyr::count(Time_Month, SDQ_caseness, Severity) %>%

group_by(Time_Month, SDQ_caseness) %>%

    mutate(Percentage = (n / sum(n)) * 100) %>%

  ungroup()


wholesample$Severity <- factor(wholesample$Severity, levels = c(0:1), labels = c("Unlikely", "Likely"))

I then used ggplot2 and geom_area to create the area graphs and set the background as transparent.

p <-  ggplot(subset(wholesample, Severity == "Likely"), 

         aes(x = Time_Month, y = Percentage)) + 

    geom_area(stat = "identity", group = 1, color="#0B747A", fill="#0B747A", alpha = 0.2) +
 coord_cartesian(ylim = c(0,50))+ 

   labs(x = NULL, y = 'Percentage %') + facet_wrap(~ SDQ_caseness, ncol=5) +

   theme(legend.title = element_blank(), legend.position="right") + 

   geom_vline(xintercept= 5, linetype="longdash", colour = "black") + # to create vertical lines

   geom_vline(xintercept= 10.5, linetype="solid", colour = "black") + 

      theme(legend.title = element_blank(), legend.position="right") +

   theme_blank() +

       theme(

        panel.grid.major = element_blank(), 

        panel.grid.minor = element_blank(),

        panel.background = element_rect(fill = "transparent",colour = NA),

        plot.background = element_rect(fill = "transparent",colour = NA)

        ) # to create a transparent background 


 
  ggsave("children_mentalhealth.png", p, bg = "transparent", width = 17, height = 3.6)

Impact of COVID-19 on children's mental health