Swedish Student Mental Health During Pandemic Remote Instruction

This dataset supports a natural experiment analysis of how remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic affected student mental healthcare usage in Sweden. It includes the full population of 346,840 lower secondary and 347,897 upper secondary students for the 2019/2020 academic year, tracked for 21 months after the initial school closure.

Use Cases

• Analyze the difference-in-difference estimates showing a 4.4 percent decrease in mental healthcare service use under remote instruction.
• Study the long-term effects of the pandemic by tracking student outcomes for 21 months after the initial school closure.
• Compare mental health outcomes between lower secondary (in-person) and upper secondary (remote) student cohorts during the 2019/2020 academic year.
• Investigate the absence of a rebound effect in mental healthcare usage when following students to the end of the study period in 2021.

Strengths

• Covers the full population of Swedish lower and upper secondary students for the relevant period, with over 694,000 total student records in the main exposure year.
• Provides longitudinal data tracking students for 21 months after the initial school closure, enabling analysis of long-term effects.
• Leverages a natural experiment design comparing students under different instruction modes (remote vs. in-person) during the pandemic.

Limitations

• The dataset's specific variables, such as individual diagnosis codes or prescription drug types, are not detailed in the available description.
• Findings are specific to the Swedish educational and healthcare context during the pandemic, which may limit generalizability.
• The temporal coverage ends in 2021, so it does not capture post-pandemic mental health trends.

Provenance

Source

ICPSR Harvested Dataverse, author Evelina Björkegren.

Collection Method

Administrative data covering all students enrolled in lower and upper secondary schools in Sweden.

Time Range

Covers the 2019/2020 academic year and tracks students until the end of 2021.

Freshness

Last updated on 2026-02-23.

Geography

Sweden.