Abstract
Many previous studies have indicated that urban adolescents show a higher level of mental health in China compared to rural adolescents. Specifically, girls in rural areas represented a high-risk group prior to the 21st century, demonstrating more suicidal behaviour and ideation than those in the urban areas because of the severe gender inequality in rural China. However, because of the urbanisation process and centralised policy to eliminate gender inequality in recent decades, the regional and gender differences in mental health might decrease. This research aimed to probe the gender and regional differences in depressive traits among adolescent students currently in China. We adopted the national survey dataset Chinese Family Panel Studies (CFPS) conducted in 2018. Accordingly, 2173 observations from 10–15-year-old subjects were included. CFPS utilised an eight-item questionnaire to screen individuals’ depressive traits. Two dimensions of depressive traits were confirmed by CFA, namely depressed affect and anhedonia. The measurement invariance tests suggested that the two-factor model was applicable for both males and females and rural and urban students. Based on the extracted values from the CFA model, MANOVA results revealed that, compared to boys, girls experienced more depressed affect. Moreover, rural students demonstrated more anhedonia symptoms. There was no interaction between gender and region. The results suggest that, even though the gender and regional differences are small, being a female and coming from a rural area are still potential risk factors for developing depressive traits among adolescent students in China.
Highlights
We only found the difference in anhedonia between rural and urban students, which means that, regarding the regional inequality in depressive traits among children and adolescents, we should focus on the positive affect and cognitions rather than depressed aspects, such as self-esteem, life satisfaction, self-efficacy, etc
The survey indicated that adolescent gender and regional inequality in terms of mental health is small in China today
This study suggests that the urbanisation process conducted over decades has contributed to eliminating regional inequality and protecting female children in rural areas
Summary
The differences between rural and urban areas in China have been investigated for a long time. Rural areas and urban areas represent different worlds in China. There are huge social inequalities across the two areas, including economic aspects, access to medical support, and educational resources [1,2,3]. The rural–urban gap of inequality of income has become larger since 1978 [4]. In the 1980s, the Gini coefficient was around 0.3, and by 2013, it reached the level of 0.61, compared with around 0.45 in the United States [4]. Regarding the health service aspect, Int. J.
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