DAI Advisory: Solo Field Research on Student Mental Health

During her time at DAI Advisory, Vaanya served as a research assistant on a Harvard-affiliated project examining student mental health at Delhi University. It was her first experience conducting solo field research, going directly into classrooms to interview students and teachers.

The project was designed to understand the student college experiences, family background, mental well being and future aspirations. The objective was to collect this baselines data, create an intervention an then see if it had created a meaningful change. Vaanya was able to run field visits independently, administering surveys and conducting conversations with both students and faculty.

Additionally, when what she found in the field diverged from what she expected going in, she immediately reported back. She noted students were more open about their difficulties than anticipated, and teachers were candid about their frustrations with the university administration. Structural changes to the university system: the shift from an annual to a semester-based curriculum had left both teachers and students feeling rushed, which was a meaningful driver of stress.

Vaanya emphasised maintaining the integrity of the survey design throughout. Changing questions mid-survey would have distorted the baseline, so she kept the instrument intact. But she updated her reporting to the primary investigators to reflect what she was hearing in the field, feeding the structural context back to the team as a layer of qualitative insight that the survey data alone would not have captured.