A Multi-Level Analysis on School Connectedness, Family Support, and Adolescent Depression: Evidence from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, 1995–1996

Lin Zhu

doi:10.3390/socsci7050072

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study is to gain insight into the effect of family support, school connectedness, and school environments on depressive symptoms among adolescents across racial/ethnic groups on both the student-level and school-level. Method: This study uses a sample of 4228 students (2122 girls and 2016 boys) from the public use data of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Students were measured at two time points (one year apart) on school connectedness, family support, socio-demographic factors, and the Center for Epidemiological Studies’ Depression Scale. Hierarchical Linear Modeling was used to examine potential predictors on adolescent depressive symptoms. This is, to the best of the author’s knowledge, the first study to examine the interplay of school connectedness, school racial composition, and adolescent depression. Results: School connectedness partially mediates the effects of family support on depressive symptoms, but both remain strong predictors of depressive symptoms. African American adolescents are the only racial/ethnic group that has constantly higher CES-D scores than the non-Hispanic white adolescents. School-level connectedness is positively related to students’ depressive symptoms. The racial composition of a school has different effects on students’ depressive symptoms on student’s race. Conclusions: Low perceived family support, low school connectedness, being female, and being African American are consistently associated with greater depressive symptoms one year later. The overall level of school connectedness of a school is found to be related with greater individual student’s depressive symptoms, while the effects of school proportion of minority students on students’ depressive symptoms differ significantly across the race/ethnicity of students. Future study is needed to explore the association between racial/ethnic segregation and adolescent depression while considering students’ racial/ethnic status.

Highlights

Depression is one of the most common mental disorders in the US, and it carries the heaviest burden of disability among mental and behavioral disorders (World Health Organization 2017)
African American are consistently associated with greater depressive symptoms one year later
By using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM), this paper examines the associations on both student-level and school-level simultaneously, shedding lights on the multilevel mechanisms of adolescent depression in school contexts

Summary

Introduction

Depression is one of the most common mental disorders in the US, and it carries the heaviest burden of disability among mental and behavioral disorders (World Health Organization 2017). Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health showed that in 2015, 6.7% of the US adults had at least one major depressive episode in the past year (National Institute of Mental Health 2017a). The rate is almost twice as high, 12.5% to be specific, among adolescents between the age of 12 and 17 years (National Institute of Mental Health 2017b). A huge body of literature in psychology, epidemiology, and medical sociology has shown that adolescence is the critical period for depression. Incidence of adolescent depression is known to increase sharply at the age of 12 to 14 (Avenevoli et al 2015; Kessler et al 2005). Adolescence is a crucial period of life that strongly influences a person’s

Methods

Results

Conclusion