|
Abstract
|
In India, online education emerged as an effective stopgap for continuing education during COVID-19- induced school closures. However, the transition to online learning might have been challenging for some students for varying reasons. Besides a few scientific publications, such challenges were spotlighted by multiple media reports of student suicides in the context of online education.1,2 The current study aimed to understand the association between student suicides and online education through a thematic analysis of the media reports.
Methods
A Google search was performed separately for each month from June 2020 to January 2021, by customizing the search period using the “tools” option. The search command used was: online classes, suicides, India. For each search, we used an inbuilt filter within the Google search that shows the results after omitting the entries that were similar to those already displayed. By combining the search results from all eight months, we identified 899 nonrepetitive news items. These news items were subjected to the screening of title and content. Our inclusion criteria were as follows: (a) news items reporting incidents of student suicide in the context of online education and (b) news items providing adequate demographic details to establish the uniqueness of the incident, such as details of the victims (name, age, gender, class, etc.) and details of the incidents (date, time, place, area of the police station, etc.), to avoid inclusion of the same incident more than once. For the incidents reported by more than one newspaper, we chose those with more detailed descriptions of the incident.
Results
Forty-two unique news reports were included for the analysis. After a detailed reading of the content, four nonoverlapping themes were identified. These were: (a) being unable to access online education, (b) being unable to cope with online education, (c) being scolded by the parents, and (d) unknown (reason not reported). We organized the demographic details and thematic categories in a Microsoft Excel Sheet and performed a descriptive analysis ...
Language: en |