Data and Code for: Improving Women’s Mental Health During a Pandemic

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Michael Vlassopoulos, University of Southampton, UK, and IZA.; Abu Siddique, King's College London, UK; Tabassum Rahman, University of Melbourne; Debayan Pakrashi, Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata and IIT Kanpur, India; Asad Islam, Monash University, Australia, and J-PAL; Firoz Ahmed, Technical University of Munich and Khulna University

Version: View help for Version V1

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
Replication Package			01/24/2024 09:54:AM

Project Citation:

Vlassopoulos, Michael, Siddique, Abu, Rahman, Tabassum, Pakrashi, Debayan, Islam, Asad, and Ahmed, Firoz. Data and Code for: Improving Women’s Mental Health During a Pandemic. Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2024. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2024-02-28. https://doi.org/10.3886/E167601V1

Project Description

Summary: This paper evaluates a randomized over-the-phone counseling intervention aimed at mitigating the mental health impact of COVID-19 on a sample of 2,402 women across 357 villages in Bangladesh. We find that the provision of 2 hours of mental support plus information on COVID-19 improves mental health ten months post-intervention, leading to reductions of 20% in the prevalence of moderate and severe stress and 33% in depression. Our results suggest that this type of low-cost intervention ($14 per person) can be effective in providing rapid psychological support to vulnerable groups in times of crises.

Funding Sources: Monash University (Covid19 fund)

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: Mental health; COVID-19; food security; telecounseling; randomized experiment; parental investment; rural Bangladesh

JEL Classification:
      I10 Health: General
      I12 Health Behavior
      I18 Health: Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
      I31 General Welfare; Well-Being
      O12 Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

Geographic Coverage: Bangladesh

Time Period(s): 5/2020 – 8/2021 (May 2020 - August 2021)

Data Type(s): experimental data

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Published Versions

V1 [2024-02-28]

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